“I assure you, Marsa—” began the Prince, taking her hands. “Your hands are cold. Are you ill?”
His eyes followed the direction of Marsa’s, which were still riveted upon the piano with a dumb look of unutterable agony.
He instantly seized the sealed package, and, holding it up, exclaimed:
“One would think that it was this which troubled you!”
“O Prince! I swear to you!—”
“Prince?”
He repeated in amazement this title which she suddenly gave him; she, who called him Andras, as he called her Marsa. Prince? He also, in his turn, felt a singular sensation of fright, wondering what that package contained, and if Marsa’s fate and his own were not connected with some unknown thing within it.
“Let us see,” he said, abruptly breaking the seals, “what this is.”
Rapidly, and as if impelled, despite herself, Marsa caught the wrist of her husband in her icy hand, and, terrified, supplicating, she cried, in a wild, broker voice:
“No, no, I implore you! No! Do not read it! Do not read it!”