tle of which the Tchereteff s, his ancestors, had been so
proud, and which the daughter of wandering Tzigani refused with mingled
hatred and disgust. Princess? She, the gypsy, a Russian princess? The
title would have appeared to her like a new and still more abhorrent
stigma. He implored her, but she was obdurate. It was a strange, tragic
existence these two beings led, shut up in the immense castle, 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 who