ness, or the disappearance of a nightmare in the dawn
of morning. Now, Marsa Laszlo, who, two years before, had longed for
annihilation and death, occasionally thought the little Baroness Dinati
right when she said, in her laughing voice: "What are you thinking of, my
dear child? Is it well for a girl of your age to bury herself voluntarily
and avoid society?" She was then twenty-four: in three or four years she
had aged mentally ten; but her beautiful oval face had remained
unchanged, with the purity of outline of a Byzantine Madonna.

Then--life has its awakenings--she met Prince Andras: all her admirations
as a girl, her worship of patriotism and heroism, flamed forth anew; her
heart, which she had thought dead, throbbed, as it had never throbbed
before, at the sound of the voice of this man, truly loyal, strong and
gentle, and who was (she knew it well, the unhappy girl!) the being for
whom she was created, the ideal of her dreams. She loved him silently,
but with a deep and eternal passion; she loved him without saying to
herself that she no longer had any right to love. Did she even think of
her past? Does one longer think of the storm when the wind has driven off
the heavy, tear-laden clouds, and the thunder has died away in the
distance? It seemed to her now that she had never had but one name in her
heart, and upon her lips--Zilah.

And then this man, this hero, her hero, asked her hand, and said to her,
"I love you."

Andras loved her! With what a terrible contraction of the heart did she
put to herself the formidable question: "Have I the right to lie? Shall I
have the courage to confess?"

She held in her grasp the most perfect happiness a woman could hope for,
the dream of her whole life; and, because a worthless scoundrel had
deceived her, because there were, in her past, hours which she remembered
only to curse, effaced hours, hours which appeared to her now never to
have existed, was she obliged to ruin her life, to break her heart, and,
herself the victim, to pay for the lie uttered by a coward? Was it right?
Was it just? Was she to be forever bound to that past, like a corpse to
its grave? What! She had no longer the right to love? no longer the right
to live?

She adored Andras; she would have given her life for him. And he also
loved her; she was the first woman who had ever touched his heart. He had
evidently felt himself isolated, with his old chivalrous ideas, in a
world devoted to the worshi