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 worship of low things, tangible successes, and
profitable realities. He was, so to speak, a living anachronism in
the midst of a society which had faith in nothing except victorious
brutalities, and which marched on, crushing, beneath its iron-shod
heels, the hopes and visions of the enthusiastic. He recalled those
evenings after a battle when, in the woods reddened by the setting sun,
his father and Varhely said to him: "Let us remain to the last, and
protect the retreat!" And it seemed to him that, amid the bestialities
of the moment and the vulgarities of the century, he still protected
the retreat of misunderstood virtues and generous enthusiasms; and it
pleased him to be the rear guard of chivalry in defeat.

He shut himself up obstinately in his isolation, like Marsa in her
solitude; and he did not consider himself ridiculously absurd or
foolishly romantic, when he remembered that his countrymen, the
Hungarians, were the only people, perhaps, who, in the abasement of all
Europe before the bruta