Then, surveying him from head to foot, as if to measure the degree of audacity to which he could attain, “Adieu!” she said. “Au revoir!” he rejoined coldly, giving to the salutation an emphasis full of hidden meaning. The Tzigana stretched out her hand, and pulled a silken bellcord. A servant appeared. “Show this gentleman out,” she said, very quietly. CHAPTER XIV. “HAVE I THE RIGHT TO LIE?” Then the Tzigana’s romance, in which she had put all her faith and her belief, had ended, like a bad dream, she said to herself: “My life is over!” What remained to her? Expiation? Forgetfulness? She thought of the cloister and the life of prayer of those blue sisters she saw under the trees of Maisons-Lafitte. She lived in the solitude of her villa, remaining there during the winter in a melancholy tete-a-tete with old Vogotzine, who was always more or less under the effect of liquor. Then, as death would not take her, she gradually began to go into Parisian society, slowly forgetting the past, and the folly which she had taken for love little by little faded mistily away. It was like a recovery from an illness, or the disappearance of a nightmare in the dawn of morning. Now, Marsa Laszlo, who, two years before, had longed for annihilation and death, occasionally thought the little Baroness Dinati right when she said, in her laughing voice: “What are you thinking of, my dear child? Is it well for a girl of your age to bury herself voluntarily and avoid society?” She was then twenty-four: in three or four years she had aged mentally ten; but her beautiful oval face had remained unchanged, with the purity of outline of a Byzantine Madonna. Then--life has its awakenings--she met Prince Andras: all her admirations as a girl, her worship of patriotism and heroism, flamed forth anew; her heart, which she had thought dead, throbbed, as it had never throbbed before, at the sound of the voice of this man, truly loyal, strong and gentle, and who was (she knew it well, the unhappy girl!) the being for whom she was created, the ideal of her dreams. She loved him silently, but with a deep and eternal passion; she loved him without saying to herself that she no longer had any right to love. Did she even think of her past? Does one longer think of the storm when the wind has driven off the heavy, tear-laden clouds, and the thunder has died away in the distance? It seemed to her now that she had never had but one name in her heart, and upon her lips--Zilah. And then this man, this hero, her hero, asked her hand, and said to her, “I love you.” Andras loved her! With what a terrible contraction of the heart did she put to herself the formidable question: “Have I the right to lie? Shall I have the courage to confess?”