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"With what princess?" he asked calmly, and without a trace of surprise or resentment in his perfectly trained countenance. "Zara de Echeveria," I said, coldly. "I do not know her." "No! She knows you." "Indeed? It is an honor to be known by a princess." "I have it from her own lips that she is responsible for your presence in the palace."
You have chosen, at this time, to mention a princess, to whom you give the name of Zara de Echeveria, and I have told you that I know no such person; that the name means nothing to me. What you may surmise, Mr. Dubravnik, can have no effect upon me, or upon your relations with me, or mine with you.
Presently she returned and came back to where I was standing. "It is strange, is it not, Mr. Derrington?" she asked in a low voice. "I do not think that I am myself to-day. It is hard to realize that this is Zara de Echeveria who speaks to you now. I am like another person; it is as though another spirit had entered my body, and I seem to act without a will of my own.
I did not see the prince again until he called for me on his way to the house of the princess where we found the parlors thronged, so that it was with difficulty that we presently made our way among the massed guests to the point where Zara de Echeveria was receiving her friends.
Standing there in the presence of Zara de Echeveria, surrounded as we were by throngs of guests, interrupted frequently as it was quite natural we should be, we two were yet as utterly alone as if we had been standing upon a solitary rock in the midst of a waste of waters beyond which the vision could not penetrate.
As name after name was read off, until the number amounted to many hundreds the face of Ivan de Echeveria became as pale as death, and when, at last, his own sister's name was read, and I remarked grimly that she was already a prisoner, and would be on her way to Siberia within the week, he broke out in curses and threats, to which, of course, not one of us paid the slightest attention.
Eileen changed the subject swiftly. "What was Linda saying to you?" she asked. "She was showing me a plant, a rare Echeveria of the Cotyledon family, that she tobogganed down one side of Multiflores Canyon and delivered safely on the roadway without its losing an appreciable amount of 'bloom' from its exquisitely painted leaves." Eileen broke in rudely. "Linda has missed Marian.
It is impossible to describe the sense of outrage which Zara de Echeveria managed to include in the enunciation of those two words. Listening from my place among the cushions in the Turkish bower, I was conscious of a feeling of gladness that it was so; that she resented the tone of the man, as well as the words he had uttered; that she repudiated utterly the insinuation he had made.
"Did I not tell you that I am in the service of the czar?" "Of my worst enemy, yes." "Is it not wise to compel your enemies to do your service?" "Can I accept a service from one whom I hate as I do him?" "I think so, if your life and mine are both dependent upon that service." "But where are we going?" "To the Vladek prison." "I? Zara de Echeveria, to prison?" "Yes." "And you?"
From their view of the case, I was merely a spy, or at least a prospective one, who had overheard a confidence delivered by the Princess Zara de Echeveria, which placed her so absolutely in my power that I held her life, as the saying goes, in the hollow of my hand; and they could not know, would never guess, that now we had learned to love each other, and that she was dearer and sweeter to me than all else in the world.
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