he negotiations with Warsaw, however, detained Yanski Varhely at Vienna
longer than he wished. Count Josef evidently went zealously to work to
obtain from the Russian Government Menko's release. He had promised
Varhely, the evening he received his old comrade at dinner, that he would
put all the machinery at work to obtain the fulfilment of his request. "I
only ask you, if I attain the desired result, that you will do something
to cool off that hotheaded Menko. A second time he would not escape
Siberia."

Varhely had made no reply; but the very idea that Michel Menko might be
free made his head swim. There was, in the Count's eagerness to obtain
Menko's liberty, something of the excitement of a hunter tracking his
prey. He awaited Michel's departure from the fortress as if he were a
rabbit in its burrow.

"If he is set at liberty, I suppose that we shall know where he goes," he
said to the minister.

"It is more than probable that the government of the Czar will trace his
journey for him. You shall be informed."

Count Ladany did not seek to know for what purpose Varhely demanded, with
such evident eagerness, this release. It was enough for him that his old
brother-in-arms desired it, and that it was possible.

"You see how everything is for the best, Varhely," he said to him one
morning. "Perhaps you blamed me when you learned that I had accepted a
post from Austria. Well, you see, if I did not serve the Emperor, I could
not serve you!"

During his sojourn at Vienna, Varhely kept himself informed, day by day,
as to what was passing in Paris. He did not write to Prince Zilah,
wishing, above everything, to keep his errand concealed from him; but
Angelo Valla, who had remained in France, wrote or telegraphed whatever
happened to the Prince.

Marsa Laszlo was cured; she had left Dr. Sims's institution, and returned
to the villa of Maisons-Lafitte.

The poor girl came out of her terrible stupor with the distaste to take
up the thread of life which sometimes comes after a night of
forgetfulness in sleep. This stupor, which might have destroyed her, and
the fever which had shaken her, seemed to her sweet and enviable now
compared to this punishment: To live! To live and think!

And yet--yes, she wished to live to once more see Andras, whose look,
fixed upon her, had rekindled the extinct intellectual flame of her
being. She wished to live, now that her reason had returned to her, to
live to wrest from the Prince a