s lightly
as they appeared, in a breath of air or a whirlwind.

Count Yanski Varhely, the oldest, strongest, and most devoted friend of
all those who surrounded the Prince, knew very well why this fanciful
idea had come to Andras. At forty-four, the Prince was bidding farewell
to his bachelor life: it was no folly, and Yanski saw with delight that
the ancient race of the Zilahs, from time immemorial servants of
patriotism and the right, was not to be extinct with Prince Andras.
Hungary, whose future seemed brightening; needed the Zilahs in the future
as she had needed them in the past.

"I have only one objection to make to this marriage," said Varhely; "it
should have taken place sooner." But a man can not command his heart to
love at a given hour. When very young, Andras Zilah had cared for
scarcely anything but his country; and, far from her, in the bitterness
of exile, he had returned to the passion of his youth, living in Paris
only upon memories of his Hungary. He had allowed year after year to roll
by, without thinking of establishing a home of his own by marriage. A
little late, but with heart still warm, his spirit young and ardent, and
his body strengthened rather than worn out by life, Prince Andras gave to
a woman's keeping his whole being, his soul with his name, the one as
great as the other. He was about to marry a girl of his own choice, whom
he loved romantically; and he wished to give a surrounding of poetic
gayety to this farewell to the past, this greeting to the future. The men
of his race, in days gone by, had always displayed a gorgeous, almost
Oriental originality: the generous eccentricities of one of Prince
Andras's ancestors, the old Magyar Zilah, were often cited; he it was who
made this answer to his stewards, when, figures in hand, they proved to
him, that, if he would farm out to some English or German company the
cultivation of his wheat, corn, and oats, he would increase his revenue
by about six hundred thousand francs a year:

"But shall I make these six hundred thousand francs from the nourishment
of our laborers, farmers, sowers, and gleaners? No, certainly not; I
would no more take that money from the poor fellows than I would take the
scattered grains from the birds of the air."

It was also this grandfather of Andras, Prince Zilah Ferency, who, when
he had lost at cards the wages of two hundred masons for an entire year,
employed these men in constructing chateaux, which he burn