ss, a sort of youthful buoyancy. Many men of thirty were less
fresh in mind and body than he. He was one of those beings who die, as
they have lived, children: even the privations of the hardest kind of an
existence can not take away from them that purity and childlike trust
which seem to be an integral part of themselves, and which, although they
may be betrayed, deceived and treated harshly by life, they never wholly
lose; very manly and heroic in time of need and danger, they are by
nature peculiarly exposed to treasons and deceptions which astonish but
do not alter them. Since man, in the progress of time, must either harden
or break to pieces, the hero in them is of iron; but, on the other hand,
their hearts are easily wounded by the cruel hand of some woman or the
careless one of a child.

Andras Zilah had not yet loved deeply, as it was in his nature to love.
More or less passing caprices had not dried up the spring of real passion
which was at the bottom of his heart. But he had not sought this love;
for he adored his Hungary as he would have loved a woman, and the bitter
recollection of her defeat gave him the impression of a love that had
died or been cruelly betrayed.

Yanski, on the whole, had not greatly troubled himself to demonstrate
mathematically or philosophically that a "hussar pupil" was an absolute
necessity to him. People can not be forced, against their will, to marry;
and the Prince, after all, was free, if he chose, to let the name of
Zilah die with him.

"Taking life as it is," old Varhely would growl, "perhaps it isn't
necessary to bring into the world little beings who never asked to come
here." And yet breaking off in his pessimism, and with a vision before
his eyes of another Andras, young, handsome, leading his hussars to the
charge "and yet, it is a pity, Andras, it is a pity."

The decisions of men are more often dependent upon chance than upon their
own will. Prince Andras received an invitation to dinner one day from the
little Baroness Dinati, whom he liked very much, and whose husband, Orso
Dinati, one of the defenders of Venice in the time of Manin, had been his
intimate friend. The house of the Baroness was a very curious place; the
reporter Jacquemin, who was there at all times, testing the wines and
correcting the menus, would have called it "bizarre." The Baroness
received people in all circles of society; oddities liked her, and she
did not dislike oddities. Very honest, ver