“You!” she said again.  And Michel Menko felt in this word a mass of bitter rancor and stifled hatred which suddenly burst its bonds.

“Yes, me!” he said, braving the insult of Marsa’s cry and look.  “Me, who love you, and whom you have loved!”

“Ah, don’t dare to say that!” she cried, drawing close to the little table where the daggers rested amid the objects of art.  “Don’t be vile enough to speak to me of a past of which nothing remains to me but disgust!  Let not one word which recalls it to me mount to your lips, not one, you understand, or I will kill you like the coward you are!”

“Do so, Marsa!” he cried with wild, mad passion.  “I should die by your hand, and you would not marry that man!”

Afraid of herself, wresting her eyes from the glittering daggers, she threw herself upon the divan, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, and watched, with the look of a tigress, Michel, who said to her now, in a voice which trembled with the tension of his feelings:  “You must know well, Marsa, that death is not the thing that can frighten a man like me!  What does frighten me is that, having lost you once, I may lose you forever; to know that another will be your husband, will love you, will receive your kisses.  The very idea that that is possible drives me insane.  I feel myself capable of any deed of madness to prevent it.  Marsa!  Marsa!  You did love me once!”

“I love honor, truth, justice,” said Marsa, sternly and implacably.  “I thought I loved you; but I never did.”

“You did not love me?” he said.

This cruel recalling of the past, which was the remorse of her life, was like touching her flesh with a red-hot iron.

“No, no, no!  I did not love you!  I repeat, I thought I loved you.  What did I know of life when I met you?  I was suffering, ill; I thought myself dying, and I never heard a word of pity fall from any other lips than yours.  I thought you were a man of honor.  You were only a wretch.  You deceived me; you represented yourself to me as free—­and you were married.  Weakly—­oh, I could kill myself at the very thought!—­I listened to you!  I took for love the trite phrases you had used to dozens of other women; half by violence, half by ruse, you became my lover.  I do not know when—­I do not know how.  I try to forget that horrible dream; and when, deluded by you, thinking that what I felt for you was love, for I did think so, I imagined that I had given myself for life to a man worthy of the deepest devotion, ready for all sacrifices for me, as I felt myself to be for him; when you had taken me, body and soul, I learn by what? by a trifling conversation, by a chance, in a crowded ballroom—­that, this Michel Menko, whose name I was to bear, who was to be my husband; this Count Menko, this man of honor, the one in whom I believed blindly, was married!  Married at Vienna, and had already given away the name on which he traded!  Oh, it is hideous!” And the Tzigana, whose whole body was shuddering with horror, recoiled instinctively to the edge of the divan as at the approach of some detested contact.