ng one of those odd airs, which in Hungary start all feet
moving and keeping time to the music, exclaimed:

"A quadrille! Let us dance a quadrille! An Hungarian quadrille!"

The poor people on the barge listened to the music, gradually growing
fainter and fainter; and they would have believed that they had been
dreaming, if the purse had not been there, a fortune for them, and the
fruit which the children were eating. The mother, without understanding,
repeated that mysterious name: "The Tzigana."

And Marsa also gazed after them, her ears caressed by the czardas of the
musicians. The big barge disappeared in the distance in a luminous haze;
but the Tzigana could still vaguely perceive the little beings perched
upon the shoulders of the men, and waving, in sign of farewell, pieces of
white cloth which their mother had given them.

A happy torpor stole over Marsa; and, while the guests of the Baroness
Dinati, the Japanese Yamada, the English heiresses, the embassy attaches,
all these Parisian foreigners, led by Jacquemin, the director of the
gayety, were organizing a ballroom on the deck, and asking the Tzigani
for polkas of Fahrbach and waltzes of Strauss, the young girl heard the
voice of Andras murmur low in her ear:

"Ah! how I love you! And do you love me, Marsa?"

"I am happy," she answered, without moving, and half closing her eyes,
"and, if it were necessary for me to give my life for you, I would give
it gladly."

In the stern of the boat, Michel Menko watched, without seeing them,
perhaps, the fields, the houses of Pecq, the villas of Saint-Germain, the
long terrace below heavy masses of trees, the great plain beside Paris
with Mont Valerien rising in its midst, the two towers of the Trocadero,
whose gilded dome sparkled in the sun, and the bluish-black cloud which
hung over the city like a thick fog.

The boat advanced very slowly, as if Prince Andras had given the order to
delay as much as possible the arrival at Maisons-Lafitte, where the whole
fete would end for him, as Marsa was to land there. Already, upon the
horizon could be perceived the old mill, with its broad, slated roof. The
steeple of Sartrouville loomed up above the red roofs of the houses and
the poplars which fringe the bank of the river. A pale blue light, like a
thin mist, enveloped the distant landscape.

"The dream is over," murmured Marsa.

"A far more beautiful one will soon begin," said Andras, "and that one
will be the reali