And Andras himself divined something of this feeling; he felt that Marsa, despite her enigmatical refusal, cared for him in a way that was something more than friendship; he was certain of it. Then, why did she command him thus with a single word to despair? “Never!” She was not free, then? And a question, for which he immediately asked her pardon by a gesture, escaped, like the appeal of a drowning man, from his lips:
“Do you love some one else, Marsa?”
She uttered a cry.
“No! I swear to you—no!”
He urged her, then, to explain what was the meaning of her refusal, of the fright she had just shown; and, in a sort of nervous hysteria which she forced herself to control, in the midst of stifled sobs, she told him that if she could ever consent to unite herself to anyone, it would be to him, to him alone, to the hero of her country, to him whose chivalrous devotion she had admired long before she knew him, and that now—And here she stopped short, just on the brink of an avowal.
“Well, now? Now?” demanded Andras, awaiting the word which, in her overstrung condition, Marsa had almost spoken. “Now?”
But she did not speak these words which Zilah begged for with newly awakened hope. She longed to end this interview which was killing her, and in broken accents asked him to excuse her, to forgive her—but she was really ill.
“But if you are suffering, I can not, I will not leave you.”
“I implore you. I need to be alone.”
“At least you will permit me to come to-morrow, Marsa, and ask for your answer?”