Mentor, more obedient than a servant, and as silent as a statue; and this
strange guardian, who had formerly fought side by side with Schamyl, and
cut down the Circassians with the sang-froid of a butcher's boy wringing
the neck of a fowl, and who now scarcely dared to open his lips, as if
the entire police force of the Czar had its eye upon him; this old
soldier, who once cared nothing for privations, now, provided he had his
chocolate in the morning, his kummel with his coffee at breakfast, and a
bottle of brandy on the table all day--left Marsa free to think, act,
come and go as she pleased.

She had accepted the Prince's legacy, but with this mental reservation
and condition, that the Hungarian colony of Paris should receive half of
it. It seemed to her that the money thus given to succor the compatriots
of her mother would be her father's atonement. She waited, therefore,
until she had attained her majority; and then she sent this enormous sum
to the Hungarian aid society, saying that the donor requested that part
of the amount should be used in rebuilding the little village in
Transylvania which had been burned twenty years before by Russian troops.
When they asked what name should be attached to so princely a gift, Marsa
replied: "That which was my mother's and which is mine, The Tzigana."
More than ever now did she cling to that cognomen of which she was so
proud.

"And," she said to Zilah, after she had finished the recital of her
story, "it is because I am thus named that I have the right to speak to
you of yourself."

Prince Andras listened with passionate attention to the beautiful girl,
thus evoking for him the past, confident and even happy to speak and make
herself known to the man whose life of heroic devotion she knew so well.