me. He had to be away again at once, and he asked me to
excuse him to you."

The Prince did not make any further attempt to find out what was the
reason of his friend's sudden flight, for Varhely was already descending
the steps of the villa.

Andras then felt a profound sensation of loneliness, and he thought
again of the woman whom his imagination pictured haggard and wan in the
asylum of Vaugirard.

CHAPTER XXVII. "WHAT MATTERS IT HOW MUCH WE SUFFER?"

Two hours after Varhely had gone, a sort of feverish attraction drew
Prince Andras to the spot where, the night before, he had listened to
the Tzigana airs.

Again, but alone this time, he drank in the accents of the music of his
country, and sought to remember the impression produced upon him when
Marsa had played this air or that one, this sad song or that czardas.
He saw her again as she stood on the deck of the steamer, watching
the children on the barge as they threw her kisses of farewell. More
troubled than ever, nervous and suffering, Zilah returned home late in
the afternoon, opened the desk where he kept Marsa's letters, and one by
one, impelled by some inexplicable sentiment, 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 v