“Oh! you!” she said, with a sad smile; “your life is history; mine is drama, melodrama even.  There is a great difference.”

“Pardon my presumption!”

“Oh!  I will willingly tell you of my life, if the existence of a useless being like myself can interest you; but not here in the noise of this dinner.  It would be absurd,” with a change of tone, “to mingle tears with champagne.  By-and-bye!  By-and-bye!”

She made an evident effort to appear gay, like the pretty women who were there, and who, despite their prettiness, seemed to Andras perfectly insignificant; but she did not succeed in driving away the cloud of sadness which overshadowed her exquisite, dark face.  And in the ears of the Prince rang again the bitter accents of that voice saying in a harsh, almost revolted tone: 

“Yes, a Russian!  My father was a Russian!”

CHAPTER VI

A GYPSY PRINCESS

The mystery which seemed to envelop Marsa, the flash of anger with which she had spoken of the Russian who was her father, all attracted the Prince toward her; and he experienced a deliciously disquieting sentiment, as if the secret of this girl’s existence were now grafted upon his own life.

She seemed to have no wish to keep her secret from him.  At their first meeting, during the conversation which followed the dinner and the musical exhibition given by extraordinary musicians with long, unkempt locks, Marsa, trusting with a sort of joy to the one whom she regarded as a hero, told Prince Andras the story of her life.

She related to him the assault made by soldiers of Paskiewich upon the little Hungarian village, and how her grandfather, leaving his czimbalom, had fired upon the Russians from the ranks of the honveds.  There was a combat, or rather a butchery, in the sole street of the town, one of the last massacres of the campaign.  The Russians destroyed everything, shooting down the prisoners, and burning the poor little houses.  There were some women among the Hungarians and Tzigani; they had loaded the guns of the wounded, comforted the dying and avenged the dead.  Many of them were killed.  One of them, the youngest and prettiest, a gypsy, was seized by the Russian officer, and, when peace was declared soon after, carried off by him to Russia.  This was Tisza Laszlo, Marsa’s mother.  The officer, a great Russian nobleman, a handsome fellow and extremely rich, really loved her with a mad sort of love.  He forced her to become his mistress; but he tried in every way to make her pardon the brutality of his passion; keeping her half a captive in his castle near Moscow, and yet offering her, by way of expiation, not only his fortune but his name, the princely title of which the Tchereteff s, his ancestors, had been so proud, and which the daughter of wandering Tzigani refused with mingled hatred and disgust.  Princess?  She, the gypsy, a Russian princess?  The title