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 whose proud language the word honor recurs again
and again.

Marsa grew up in the Muscovite castle, loving nothing in the world except
her mother, and regarding with frightened eyes the blond stranger who
sometimes took her upon his knees and gazed sadly into her face. Before
this man, who was her father, she felt as if she were in the presence of
an enemy. As Tisza never went out, Marsa rarely quitted the castle; and,
when she went to Moscow, she hastened to return to her mother. The very