atters little to me. I shall not
be in the pavilion where you have spoken to me of your love, and I will
have it torn down and the debris of it burned within three days. I shall
not await you. I shall never see you again. I do not fear you. And I
leave you the right of doing with those letters what you please!"

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;