Russian soil was in itself
some consolation, and who knew? perhaps she might again see her dear
fatherland.

Tisza, in fact, breathed more freely in Paris, repeating however, like a
mournful refrain, the proverb of her country: Away from Hungary, life
is not life. The Prince purchased, at Maisons-Lafitte, not far from the
forest of Saint-Germain, a house surrounded by an immense garden. Here,
as formerly at Moscow, Tisza and the Prince lived together, and yet
apart--the Tzigana, implacable in her resentment, bitterly refusing all
pardon to the Russian, and always keeping alive in Marsa a hatred of
all that was Muscovite; the Prince, disconsolate, gloomy, discouraged
between the woman whom he adored and whose heart he could not win, and
the girl, so wonderfully beautiful, the living portrait of her mother,
and who treated him with the cold respect one shows to a stranger.

Not long after their arrival in Paris, a serious heart trouble attacked
Marsa's father. He summoned to his deathbed the Tzigana and her
daughter; and, in a sort of supreme confession, he openly asked his
child, before the mother, to forgive him for her birth.

"Marsa," he said, slowly, "your birth, which should make the joy of my
existence, is the remorse of my whole life. But I am dying of the love
which I can not conquer. Will you kiss me as a token that you have
pardoned me?"

For the first time, perhaps, Marsa's lips, trembling with emotion, then
touched the Prince's forehead. But, before kissing him, her eyes had
sought those of her mother, who bowed her head in assent.

"And you," murmured the dying Prince, "will you forgive me, Tisza?"

The Tzigana saw again her native village in flames, her brothers dead,
her father murdered, and this man, now lying thin and pale amid the
pillows, erect, with sabre drawn, crying: "Courage! Charge! Forward!"

Then she saw herself dragged almost beneath a horse's hoofs, cast into
a wagon with wrists bound together, carried in the rear of an army with
the rest of the victor's spoils, and immured within Russian walls. She
felt again on her lips the degradation of the first kiss of this man
whose suppliant, pitiful love was hideous to her.

She made a step toward the dying man as if to force herself to whisper,
"I forgive you;" but all the resentment and suffering of her life
mounted to her heart, almost stifling her, and she paused, going no
farther, and regarding with a haggard glance the man whose eyes i