received for some woman. This was the rumor in Paris. The
young Count had, in fact, closed his doors to every one; and no one
but his physician had been admitted. What woman could it be? The little
Baroness could not imagine.

Marsa thought again, with a shudder, of the night when the dogs howled;
but, to tell the truth, she had no remorse. She had simply defended
herself! The inquiry begun by the police had ended in no definite
result. At Maisons-Lafitte, people thought that the Russian house had
been attacked by some thieves who had been in the habit of entering
unoccupied houses and rifling them of their contents. They had even
arrested an old vagabond, and accused him of the attempted robbery at
General Vogotzine's; but the old man had answered: "I do not even know
the house." But was not this Menko a hundred times more culpable than a
thief? It was more and worse than money or silver that he had dared
to come for: it was to impose his love upon a woman whose heart he had
well-nigh broken. Against such an attack all weapons were allowable,
even Ortog's teeth. The dogs of the Tzigana had known how to defend her;
and it was what she had expected from her comrades.

Had Michel Menko died, Marsa would have said, with the fatalism of the
Orient: "It was his own will!" She was grateful, however, to fate, for
having punished the wretch by letting him live. Then she thought no more
of him except to execrate him for having poisoned her happiness, and
condemned her either to a silence as culpable as a lie, or to an avowal
as cruel as a suicide.

The night passed and the day came at last, when it was necessary for
Marsa to become the wife of Prince Andras, or to confess to him her
guilt. She wished that she had told him all, now that she had not the
courage to do so. She had accustomed herself to the idea that a woman is
not necessarily condemned to love no more because she has encountered a
coward who has abused her love. She was in an atmosphere of illusion
and chimera; what was passing about her did not even seem to exist. Her
maids dressed her, and placed upon her dark hair the bridal veil: she
half closed her eyes and murmured:

"It is a beautiful dream."

A dream, and yet a reality, consoling as a ray of light after a
hideous nightmare. Those things which were false, impossible, a lie, a
phantasmagoria born of a fever, were Michel Menko, the past years,
the kisses of long ago, the threats of yesterday, the bayings o