knew anything of the suffering which Andras endured. He was no longer
the same man. His handsome face, with its kindly eyes and grave smile,
was now constantly overshadowed. He spoke less, and thought more.
On the subject of his sadness and his grief, Andras never uttered a word
to any one, not even to his old friend; and Yanski, silent from the day
when he had been an unconscious messenger of ill, had not once made any
allusion to the past.

Although he knew nothing, Varhely had, nevertheless, guessed everything,
and at once. The blow was too direct and too cruelly simple for the old
Hungarian not to have immediately exclaimed, with rage:

"Those were love-letters, and I gave them to him! Idiot that I was! I
held those letters in my hand; I might have destroyed them, or crammed
them one by one down Menko's throat! But who could have suspected such
an infamy? Menko! A man of honor! Ah, yes; what does honor amount to
when there is a woman in question? Imbecile! And it is irreparable now,
irreparable!"

Varhely also was anxious to know where Menko had gone. They did not know
at the Austro-Hungarian embassy. It was a complete disappearance,
perhaps a suicide. If the old Hungarian had met the young man, he would
at least have gotten rid of part of his bile. But the angry thought that
he, Varhely, had been associated in a vile revenge which had touched
Andras, was, for the old soldier, a constant cause for ill-humor with
himself, and a thing which, in a measure, poisoned his life.

Varhely had long been a misanthrope himself; but he tried to struggle
against his own temperament when he saw Andras wrapping himself up in
bitterness and gloomy thoughts.