isons;
poor Vogotzine!"

"He smokes, drinks, takes the dogs out--"

The dogs! Marsa started. Those hounds would survive Menko, herself, the
love which she now tasted as the one joy of her life! Mechanically her
lips murmured, too low to be heard: "Ortog! Bundas!"

Then she said, aloud:

"I shall be very, glad if the poor General can return to St. Petersburg
or Odessa. One is best off at home, in one's own country. If you only
knew, Varhely, how happy I am, happy to be in Hungary. At home!"

She was very weak. The doctor made a sign to Andras to leave her for a
moment.

"Well," asked the Prince anxiously of Varhely, "how do you think she is?"

"What does the doctor say?" replied Yanski. "Does he hope to save her?"

Zilah made no response. Varhely's question was the most terrible of
answers.

Ensconced in an armchair, the Prince then laid bare his heart to old
Varhely, sitting near him. She was about to die, then! Solitude! Was that
to be the end of his life? After so many trials, it was all to end in
this: an open grave, in which his hopes were to be buried. What remained
to him now? At the age when one has no recourse against fate, love, the
one love of his life, was to be taken away from him. Varhely had
administered justice, and Zilah had pardoned--for what? To watch together
a silent tomb; yes, yes, what remained to him now?

"What remains to you if she dies?" said old Yanski, slowly. "There
remains to you what you had at twenty years, that which never dies. There
remains to you what was the love and the passion of all the Zilah princes
who lie yonder, and who experienced the same suffering, the same torture,
the same despair, as you. There remains to you our first love, my dear
Andras, the fatherland!"

The next day some Tzigana musicians, whom the Prince had sent for,
arrived at the castle. Marsa felt invigorated when she heard the
czimbalom and the piercing notes of the czardas. She had been longing for
those harmonies and songs which lay so near her heart. She listened, with
her hand clasped in that of Andras, and through the open window came the
"March of Rakoczy," the same strains which long ago had been played in
Paris, upon the boat which bore them down the Seine that July morning.

An heroic air, a song of triumph, a battle-cry, the gallop of horses, a
chant of victory. It was the air which had saluted their betrothal like a
fanfare. It was the chant which the Tzigani had played that sad night