She was very weak.  The doctor made a sign to Andras to leave her for a moment.

“Well,” asked the Prince anxiously of Varhely, “how do you think she is?”

“What does the doctor say?” replied Yanski.  “Does he hope to save her?”

Zilah made no response.  Varhely’s question was the most terrible of answers.

Ensconced in an armchair, the Prince then laid bare his heart to old Varhely, sitting near him.  She was about to die, then!  Solitude!  Was that to be the end of his life?  After so many trials, it was all to end in this:  an open grave, in which his hopes were to be buried.  What remained to him now?  At the age when one has no recourse against fate, love, the one love of his life, was to be taken away from him.  Varhely had administered justice, and Zilah had pardoned—­for what?  To watch together a silent tomb; yes, yes, what remained to him now?

“What remains to you if she dies?” said old Yanski, slowly.  “There remains to you what you had at twenty years, that which never dies.  There remains to you what was the love and the passion of all the Zilah princes who lie yonder, and who experienced the same suffering, the same torture, the same despair, as you.  There remains to you our first love, my dear Andras, the fatherland!”

The next day some Tzigana musicians, whom the Prince had sent for, arrived at the castle.  Marsa felt invigorated when she heard the czimbalom and the piercing notes of the czardas.  She had been longing for those harmonies and songs which lay so near her heart.  She listened, with her hand clasped in that of Andras, and through the open window came the “March of Rakoczy,” the same strains which long ago had been played in Paris, upon the boat which bore them down the Seine that July morning.

An heroic air, a song of triumph, a battle-cry, the gallop of horses, a chant of victory.  It was the air which had saluted their betrothal like a fanfare.  It was the chant which the Tzigani had played that sad night when Andras’s father had been laid in the earth of Attila.

“I would like,” said Marsa, when the music had ceased, “to go to the little village where my mother rests.  She was a Tzigana also!  Like them, like me!  Can I do so, doctor?”

The doctor shook his head.

“Oh, Princess, not yet!  Later, when the warm sun comes.”

“Is not that the sun?” said Marsa, pointing to the April rays entering the old feudal hall and making the bits of dust dance like sparks of gold.

“It is the April sun, and it is sometimes dangerous for—­”

The doctor paused; and, as he did not finish, Marsa said gently, with a smile which had something more than resignation in it—­happiness: 

“For the dying?”

Andras shuddered; but Marsa’s hand, which held his, did not even tremble.

Old Varhely’s eyes were dim with tears.

She knew that she was about to die.  She knew it, and smiled at kindly death.  It would take away all shame.  Her memory would be to Andras the sacred one of the woman he adored.  She would die without being held to keep that oath she had made not to survive her dreamed-of happiness, the union she had desired and accepted.  Yes, it was sweet and welcome, this death, which taking her from Andras’s love, washed away all stain.