“My name is Marsa Laszlo; and, in a few days, I shall be Princess Zilah,” responded the young girl, passing haughtily by him, “and I think you will hardly force me to make you remember it.”

She uttered these words so resolutely, haughtily, almost disdainfully, and accompanied them with such a flash from her beautiful eyes that Menko instinctively bowed his head, murmuring: 

“Forgive me!”

But he drove his nails into the palm of his clenched hand as he saw her leave that part of the boat, and retire as far from him as she could, as if his presence were an insult to her.  Tears of rage started into the young man’s eyes as he watched her graceful figure resume its former posture of dreamy absorption.

CHAPTER XI

A RIVER FETE

Close alongside of the Prince’s boat, waiting also for the opening of the lock, was one of those great barges which carry wood or charcoal up and down the Seine.

A whole family often lives on board these big, heavy boats.  The smoke of the kitchen fire issues from a sort of wooden cabin where several human beings breathe, eat, sleep, are born and die, sometimes without hardly ever having set foot upon the land.  Pots of geranium or begonia give a bit of bright color to the dingy surroundings; and the boats travel slowly along the river, impelled by enormous oars, which throw long shadows upon the water.

It was this motionless barge that Marsa was now regarding.

The hot sun, falling upon the boat, made its brown, wet sides sparkle like the brilliant wings of some gigantic scarabee; and, upon the patched, scorched deck, six or seven half-naked, sunburned children, boys and girls, played at the feet of a bundle of rags and brown flesh, which was a woman, a young woman, but prematurely old and wasted, who was nursing a little baby.

A little farther off, two men-one tough and strong, a man of thirty, whom toil had made forty, the other old, wrinkled, white-haired and with skin like leather, father and grandfather, doubtless, of the little brats beyond—­were eating bread and cheese, and drinking, turn by turn, out of a bottle of wine, which they swallowed in gulps.  The halt was a rest to these poor people.

As Marsa watched them, she seemed to perceive in these wanderers of the river, as in a vision, those other wanderers of the Hungarian desert, her ancestors, the Tzigani, camped in the puszta, the boundless plain, crouched down in the long grass beneath the shade of the bushes, and playing their beautiful national airs.  She saw the distant fires of the bivouac of those unknown Tzigani whose daughter she was; she seemed to breathe again the air of that country she had seen but once, when upon a mournful pilgrimage; and, in the presence of that poor bargeman’s wife, with her skin tanned by the sun, she thought of her dead, her cherished dead, Tisza.