uspended at their girdles. The little house of the community was
shut, the grating closed. The only sign of life was in the lighted
windows of the chapel.

Marsa paused there, leaning her heated brow against the cold bars of
iron, with a longing for death, and a terrible temptation to end all by
suicide.

"Who knows?" she murmured. "Perhaps forgetfulness, deep, profound
forgetfulness, lies within these walls." Forgetfulness! Marsa, then,
wished to forget? What secret torture gave to her beautiful face that
expression so bitter, so terrible in its agony?

She stood leaning there, gazing at the windows of the chapel. Broken
words of prayers, of muttered verses and responses, reached her like the
tinkling of far-off chimes, like the rustling of invisible wings. The
blue sisters, behind those walls, were celebrating their vesper service.

Does prayer drive away anguish and heartrending memories?

Marsa was a Catholic, her mother having belonged to the minority of
Tzigani professing the faith of Rome; and Tisza's daughter could,
therefore, bury her youth and beauty in the convent of the blue sisters.

The hollow murmur of the verses and prayers, which paused, began again,
and then died away in the night like sighs, attracted her, and, like the
trees of the forest, gave her an impression of that peace, that deep
repose, which was the longed-for dream of her soul.

But, suddenly, the Tzigana started, removed her gaze from the light
streaming through the blue and crimson glass, and hurried away, crying
aloud in the darkness:

"No! repose is not there. And, after all, where is repose? Only in
ourselves! It can be found nowhere, if it is not in the heart!"

Then, after these hours of solitude, this longing for the cloister, this
thirsting for annihilation and oblivion, Marsa would experience a desire
for the dashing, false, and frivolous life of Paris. She would quit
Maisons, taking with her a maid, or sometimes old Vogotzine, go to some
immense hotel, like the Continental or the Grand, dine at the table
d'hote, or in the restaurant, seeking everywhere bustle and noise, the
antithesis of the life of shade and silence which she led amid the leafy
trees of her park. She would show herself everywhere, at races, theatres,
parties--as when she accepted the Baroness Dinati's invitation; and, when
she became nauseated with all the artificiality of worldly life, she
would return eagerly to her woods, her dogs and her solitude, a