rpent, without removing the handkerchief
from her face, lest he should see her shaken with grief.

"Speak but one word to me," said Andrii, and he took her satin-skinned
hand. A sparkling fire coursed through his veins at the touch, and he
pressed the hand lying motionless in his.

But she still kept silence, never taking the kerchief from her face, and
remaining motionless.

"Why are you so sad? Tell me, why are you so sad?"

She cast away the handkerchief, pushed aside the long hair which fell
over her eyes, and poured out her heart in sad speech, in a quiet voice,
like the breeze which, rising on a beautiful evening, blows through the
thick growth of reeds beside the stream. They rustle, murmur, and
give forth delicately mournful sounds, and the traveller, pausing in
inexplicable sadness, hears them, and heeds not the fading light, nor
the gay songs of the peasants which float in the air as they return from
their labours in meadow and stubble-field, nor the distant rumble of the
passing waggon.

"Am not I worthy of eternal pity? Is not the mother that bore me
unhappy? Is it not a bitter lot which has befallen me? Art not thou a
cruel executioner, fate? Thou has brought all to my feet--the highest
nobles in the land, the richest gentlemen, counts, foreign barons, all
the flower of our knighthood. All loved me, and any one of them would
have counted my love the greatest boon. I had but to beckon, and the
best of them, the handsomest, the first in beauty and birth would have
become my husband. And to none of them didst thou incline my heart, O
bitter fate; but thou didst turn it against the noblest heroes of our
land, and towards a stranger, towards our enemy. O most holy mother of
God! for what sin dost thou so pitilessly, mercilessly, persecute me?
In abundance and superfluity of luxury my days were passed, the richest
dishes and the sweetest wine were my food. And to what end was it all?
What was it all for? In order that I might at last die a death more
cruel than that of the meanest beggar in the kingdom? And it was not
enough that I should be condemned to so horrible a fate; not enough
that before my own end I should behold my father and mother perish
in intolerable torment, when I would have willingly given my own life
twenty times over to save them; all this was not enough, but before my
own death I must hear words of love such as I had never before dreamed
of. It was necessary that he should break my heart