started into the
young man's eyes as he watched her graceful figure resume its former
posture of dreamy absorption.

CHAPTER XI

A RIVER FETE

Close alongside of the Prince's boat, waiting also for the opening of the
lock, was one of those great barges which carry wood or charcoal up and
down the Seine.

A whole family often lives on board these big, heavy boats. The smoke of
the kitchen fire issues from a sort of wooden cabin where several human
beings breathe, eat, sleep, are born and die, sometimes without hardly
ever having set foot upon the land. Pots of geranium or begonia give a
bit of bright color to the dingy surroundings; and the boats travel
slowly along the river, impelled by enormous oars, which throw long
shadows upon the water.

It was this motionless barge that Marsa was now regarding.

The hot sun, falling upon the boat, made its brown, wet sides sparkle
like the brilliant wings of some gigantic scarabee; and, upon the
patched, scorched deck, six or seven half-naked, sunburned children, boys
and girls, played at the feet of a bundle of rags and brown flesh, which
was a woman, a young woman, but prematurely old and wasted, who was
nursing a little baby.

A little farther off, two men-one tough and strong, a man of thirty, whom
toil had made forty, the other old, wrinkled, white-haired and with skin
like leather, father and grandfather, doubtless, of the little brats
beyond--were eating bread and cheese, and drinking, turn by turn, out of
a bottle of wine, which they swallowed in gulps. The halt was a rest to
these poor people.

As Marsa watched them, she seemed to perceive in these wanderers of the
river, as in a vision, those other wanderers of the Hungarian desert, her
ancestors, the Tzigani, camped in the puszta, the boundless plain,
crouched down in the long grass beneath the shade of the bushes, and
playing their beautiful national airs. She saw the distant fires of the
bivouac of those unknown Tzigani whose daughter she was; she seemed to
breathe again the air of that country she had seen but once, when upon a
mournful pilgrimage; and, in the presence of that poor bargeman's wife,
with her skin tanned by the sun, she thought of her dead, her cherished
dead, Tisza.

Tisza! To the gipsy had doubtless been given the name of the river on the
banks of which she had been born. They called the mother Tisza, in
Hungary, as in Paris they called the daughter the Tzigana. And Marsa was
prou