tomed to
laugh at everything.

A lofty soul, yes, but a soul in torment. Varhely alone, among them all,
knew anything of the suffering which Andras endured. He was no longer the
same man. His handsome face, with its kindly eyes and grave smile, was
now constantly overshadowed. He spoke less, and thought more. On the
subject of his sadness and his grief, Andras never uttered a word to any
one, not even to his old friend; and Yanski, silent from the day when he
had been an unconscious messenger of ill, had not once made any allusion
to the past.

Although he knew nothing, Varhely had, nevertheless, guessed everything,
and at once. The blow was too direct and too cruelly simple for the old
Hungarian not to have immediately exclaimed, with rage:

"Those were love-letters, and I gave them to him! Idiot that I was! I
held those letters in my hand; I might have destroyed them, or crammed
them one by one down Menko's throat! But who could have suspected such an
infamy? Menko! A man of honor! Ah, yes; what does honor amount to when
there is a woman in question? Imbecile! And it is irreparable now,
irreparable!"

Varhely also was anxious to know where Menko had gone. They did not know
at the Austro-Hungarian embassy. It was a complete disappearance, perhaps
a suicide. If the old Hungarian had met the young man, he would at least
have gotten rid of part of his bile. But the angry thought that he,
Varhely, had been associated in a vile revenge which had touched Andras,
was, for the old soldier, a constant cause for ill-humor with himself,
and a thing which, in a measure, poisoned his life.

Varhely had long been a misanthrope himself; but he tried to struggle
against his own temperament when he saw Andras wrapping himself up in
bitterness and gloomy thoughts.

Little by little, Zilah allowed himself to sink into that state where not
only everything becomes indifferent to us, but where we long for another
suffering, further pain, that we may utter more bitter cries, more
irritated complaints against fate. It seems then that everything is dark
about us, and our endless night is traversed by morbid visions, and
peopled with phantoms. The sick man--for the one who suffers such torture
is sick--would willingly seek a new sorrow, like those wounded men who,
seized with frenzy, open their wounds themselves, and irritate them with
the point of a knife. Then, misanthropy and disgust of life assume a
phase in which pain is not without