'You do not know what it is to love. I talk to you in an unknown tongue, and you have no pity, because you do not understand.'
She did not answer. Over her thoughts passed the memory of the spinet whose music she had said he could not touch and waken.
He remained a week at Hohenszalras, but he did not again speak to her of his own sufferings. He was a proud man, though humble to her.
With a sort of contrition she noticed for the first time that he wearied her; that when he spoke of his departure she was glad. He was a fine soldier, a keen hunter, rather than a man of talents. The life he loved best was his life at home in his great castles, amidst the immense plains and the primeval forests of Hungary and the lonely fastnesses of the Karpathians, or scouring a field of battle with his splendid troopers behind him, all of them his kith and kin, or men of his own soil, whom he ruled with a firm, high hand, in a generous despotism.
When he was with her she missed all the graceful tact, the subtle meanings, the varied suggestions and allusions that had made the companionship of Sabran so welcome to her. Egon Vàsàrhely was no scholar, no thinker, no satirist; he was only brave and generous, as lions are, and, vaguely, a poet without words, from the wild solitudes he loved, and the romance that lies in the nature of the Magyar. 'He knows nothing!' she thought, impatiently recalling the stores of most various and recondite knowledge with which her late companion had played so carelessly and with such ease. It seemed to her that never in her life had she weighed her cousin in scales so severe and found him so utterly wanting.
And yet how many others she knew would have found their ideal in that gallant gentleman, with his prowess, and his hardihood, and his gallantry in war, and his winsome temper, so full of fire to men, so full of chivalry for women! When Prince Egon, in his glittering dress, all fur and gold and velvet, passed up the ball-room at the Burg in Vienna, no other man in all that magnificent assembly was so watched, so admired, so sighed for: and he was her cousin, and he only wearied her!
As he was leaving, he paused a moment after bidding her farewell, and after some moments of silence, said in a low voice:
'Dear, I will not trouble you again until you summon me. Perhaps that will be many years; but whether we meet or not, time will make no change in me. I am your servant ever.'
Then he bowed over her hand once more, once more saluted her, and in a moment or two the quick trot of the horses that bore him away woke the echoes of the green hills.
She looked out of the huge arched entrance door down the green defile that led to the outer world, and felt a pang of self-reproach, of self-condemnation.