'Ah! look at him when he looks at Bela!'
She sighed; she had felt a strong emotion on the sight of her cousin, for Egon Vàsàrhely was much changed by these years of pain. His grand carriage and his martial beauty were unaltered, but all the fire and the light of earlier years were gone out of his face, and a certain gloom and austerity had come there. To all other women he would have been the more attractive for the melancholy which was in such apt contrast with the heroic adventures of his life, but to her the change in him was a mute reproach which filled her with remorse though she had done no wrong.
Meantime Prince Egon, throwing open his window, leaned out into the cold rainy night, as though a hand were at his throat and suffocating him. And amidst all the tumult of his pain and revolt, one dim thought was incessantly intruding itself; he was always thinking, as he recalled the face of Sabran and of Sabran's little son, 'Where have I seen those blue eyes, those level brows, those delicate curved lips?'
They were so familiar, yet so strange to him. When he would have given a name to them they receded into the shadows of some far away past of his own, so far away he could not follow them. He sat up half the night letting the wind beat and the rain fall on him. He could not sleep.
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
In the morrow thirty or forty people arrived, amongst them Baron Kaulnitz en congé from his embassy.
'What think you of Sabran?' he asked of Egon Vàsàrhely, who answered:
'He is a perfect gentleman. He is a charming companion. He plays admirably at écarté.
'Écarté! I spoke of his moral worth: what is your impression of that?'