"My voice failed me, as it does in a dream, when a sword is pointed at one's throat; but the lady came and stood before me, and a child was clinging to her dress. She looked at me with some surprise, and contempt for my ragged condition, but spoke as if she had never known a tear.
"'Imar, art thou not in haste to embrace thy twin sister Marva? The wrong thou hast done should not destroy all memory of the early days, when hers was thine, and thine was hers. I am prepared to forgive thee, Imar, in this time of tribulation.'
"'To forgive! I never harmed thee, Va;' I answered, using her childish name, as I always did in thoughts of her. 'But none of that now. Where is my wife? Hath any one dared to injure her?'
"Weak as I was, I leaped up from the chair, and it would have gone ill with Marva--for what is a sister compared to a wife?--if she had showed signs of flinching. But she gazed at me with a quiet disdain, as if I could not command myself.
"'I have not touched thy precious wife. I have not even set eyes on her. She hath done the injury to me, that is worse than theft of goods and cattle. Yet have I come hither, to do the duty she hath forsaken, and comfort her deserted husband from his mad adventures, while his treasure of a wife, his Royal Princess Oria, heiress to a hundred thrones, is enjoying herself at the hot springs in the world of fashion and luxury, with my noble husband Rakhan.'
"What I said, or did, or thought, I know not--perhaps, nothing. The world was all in a whirl with me, and perhaps I fainted, in my worn-out state. It does not matter what I did. From the strongest man in the Caucasus, I was struck to the level of the weakest child. Even my twin sister, with a woman's petty spite inflamed by jealousy and bitter wrong, had some of the echoes of childhood roused, and thought of the time when she loved me.
"'It is the part of a fool,' she said, meaning it for large comfort, 'to be so wild about a woman, and the phantasy that they call love. When I was a child, I believed in it; and to what has it brought me? To cast away my life upon a man, who swore that I was all the world to him, and believed it perhaps, while I was new. But lo, in a year he was weary of me, because I made too much of him. Hath Princess Oria done that? Nay, or thou wouldst be weary of her. Tush, what careth she for her lord? And why should he take it to heart like this? There are plenty of women in the world, my brother; and the more their husbands make of them, the less will they return it. I am the one that should lament, not thou. For I have lost a man, but thou a woman only. My husband will come back to me when he is weary of thy Georgian doll; and I shall be forced to welcome him. But thou, such is the law, thou hast it at thy pleasure to be free.'