you which is not a condemnation."

"I might forgive," said Andras; "but I could not forget."

"I do not ask you to forget, I do not ask you that! Does one ever forget?
And yet--yes, one does forget, one does forget, I know it. You are the
only thing in all my existence, I know only you, I think only of you. I
have loved only you!"

Andras shivered, no longer able to fly, moved to the depths of his being
by the tones of this adored voice, so long unheard.

"There was no need of bloodshed to destroy that odious past," continued
Marsa. "Ah! I have atoned for it! There is no one on earth who has
suffered as I have. I, who came across your path only to ruin your life!
Your life, my God, yours!"

She looked at him with worshipping eyes, as believers regard their god.

"You have not suffered so much as the one you stabbed, Marsa. He had
never had but one love in the world, and that love was you. If you had
told him of your sufferings, and confessed your secret, he would have
been capable of pardoning you. You deceived him. There was something
worse than the crime itself--the lie."

"Ah!" she cried, "if you knew how I hated that lie! Would to heaven that
some one would tear out my tongue for having deceived you!"

There was an accent of truth in this wild outburst of the Tzigana; and
upon the lips of this daughter of the puszta, Hungarian and Russian at
once, the cry seemed the very symbol of her exceptional nature.

"What is it you wish that I should do?" she said. "Die? yes, I would
willingly, gladly die for you, interposing my breast between you and a
bullet. Ah! I swear to you, I should be thankful to die like one of those
who bore your name. But, there is no fighting now, and I can not shed my
blood for you. I will sacrifice my life in another manner, obscurely, in
the shadows of a cloister. I shall have had neither lover nor husband, I
shall be nothing, a recluse, a prisoner. It will be well! yes, for me,
the prison, the cell, death in a life slowly dragged out! Ah! I deserve
that punishment, and I wish my sentence to come from you; I wish you to
tell me that I am free to disappear, and that you order me to do so--but,
at the same time, tell me, oh, tell me, that you have forgiven me!"

"I!" said Andras.

In Marsa's eyes was a sort of wild excitement, a longing for sacrifice, a
thirst for martyrdom.

"Do I understand that you wish to enter a convent?" asked Andras, slowly.

"Yes, the strictest and gloomiest