he burned them, the flame of the
candle devouring the paper, whose subtle perfume mounted to his nostrils
for the last time like a dying sigh, while the wind carried off, through
the window into the infinite, the black dust of those fateful letters,
those remnants of dead passion and of love betrayed--and the past was
swept away.

The sun was slowly descending in an atmosphere of fire, while toward
Havre a silvery mist over the hills and shore heralded the approach of
chaste Dian's reign. The reflections of the sunset tinged with red and
orange the fishing boats floating over the calm sea, while a long fiery
streak marked the water on the horizon, growing narrower and narrower,
and changing to orange and then to pale yellow as the disk of the sun
gradually disappeared, and the night came on, enveloping the now inactive
city, and the man who watched the disappearance of the last fragments of
a detested love, of the love of another, of a love which had torn and
bruised his heart. And, strange to say, for some inexplicable reason,
Prince Andras Zilah now regretted the destruction of those odious
letters. It seemed to him, with a singular displacement of his
personality, that it was something of himself, since it was something of
her, that he had destroyed. He had hushed that voice which said to
another, "I love you," but which caused him the same thrill as if she had
murmured the words for him. They were letters received by his rival which
the wind carried out, an impalpable dust, over the sea; and he felt--such
folly is the human heart capable of--the bitter regret of a man who has
destroyed a little of his past.

The shadows crept over him at the same time that they crept over the sea.

"What matters it how much we suffer, or how much suffering we cause," he
murmured, "when, of all our loves, our hearts, ourselves, there remains,
after a short lapse of time--what? That!" And he watched the last atom of
burned paper float away in the deepening twilight.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE STRICKEN SOUL

His loneliness now weighed heavily upon Andras. His nerves were shaken by
the memories which the czardas of the Tzigani musicians had evoked; and
it seemed to him that the place was deserted now that they had departed,
and Varhely had gone with them. In the eternal symphony of the sea, the
lapping of the waves upon the shingle at the foot of the terrace, one
note was now lacking, the resonant note of the czimbalom yonder in t