, from the windows of which Tisza could perceive
the gilded domes of Moscow, the superb city in which she would never set
her foot, preferring the palace, sad and gloomy as a cell. Alone in the
world, the sole survivor of her massacred tribe, the Russians to her
were the murderers of her people, the assassins of the free musicians
with eagle profiles she used to follow as they played the czardas from
village to village.

She never saw Prince Tchereteff, handsome, generous, charming, loving
her and trembling before her glance although he had ruthlessly kidnapped
her from her country, that she did not think of him, sword in hand,
entering the burning Hungarian village, his face reddened by the flames,
as the bayonets of his soldiers were reddened with blood. She hated this
tall young man, his drooping moustache, his military uniform, his broad
figure, his white-gloved hands: he represented to the imprisoned Tzigana
the conqueror and murderer of her people. And yet a daughter was born to
them. She had defended herself with the cries of a tigress; and then she
had longed to die, to die of hunger, since, a close prisoner, she could
not obtain possession of a weapon, nor cast herself into the water. She
had lived, nevertheless, and then her daughter reconciled her to life.
The child which was born to her was all in all to Tizsa. Marsa was an
exact reproduction, feature by feature, of her mother, and, strange
to say, daughters generally resembling the father, had nothing of
Tchereteff, nothing Russian about her: on the contrary, she was all
Tzigana--Tzigana in the clear darkness of her skin, in her velvety eyes,
and her long, waving black hair, with its bronze reflections, which the
mother loved to wind about her thin fingers.

Her beauty, faded by long, slow sorrow, Tisza found again in her child,
a true daughter of Hungary like herself; and, as Marsa grew up, she
told her the legends, the songs, the heroism, the martyrdom, of Hungary,
picturing to the little girl the great, grassy plain, the free puszta,
peopled with a race in whose proud language the word honor recurs again
and again.

Marsa grew up in the Muscovite castle, loving nothing in the world
except her mother, and regarding with frightened eyes the blond stranger
who sometimes took her upon his knees and gazed sadly into her face.
Before this man, who was her father, she felt as if she were in the
presence of an enemy. As Tisza never went out, Marsa rarely quitt