“Ah!” she said, interrupting him with a haughty gesture, “you speak to me as if you had a right to dictate my actions.  I have given you my forgetfulness after giving you my love.  That is enough, I think.  Leave me!”

“Marsa!”

“I have hoped for a long time that I was forever delivered from your presence.  I commanded you to disappear.  Why have you returned?”

“Because, after I saw you one evening at Baroness Dinati’s (do you remember? you spoke to the Prince for the first time that evening), I learned, in London, of this marriage.  If I have consented to live away from you previously, it was because, although you were no longer mine, you at least were no one else’s; but I will not—­pardon me, I can not—­endure the thought that your beauty, your grace, will be another’s.  Think of the self-restraint I have placed upon myself!  Although living in Paris, I have not tried to see you again, Marsa, since you drove me from your presence; it was by chance that I met you at the Baroness’s; but now—­”

“It is another woman you have before you.  A woman who ignores that she has listened to your supplications, yielded to your prayers.  It is a woman who has forgotten you, who does not even know that a wretch has abused her ignorance and her confidence, and who loves—­who loves as one loves for the first time, with a pure and holy devotion, the man whose name she is to bear.”

“That man I respect as honor itself.  Had it been another, I should already have struck him in the face.  But you who accuse me of having lied, are you going to lie to him, to him?”

Marsa became livid, and her eyes, hollow as those of a person sick to death, flamed in the black circles which surrounded them.

“I have no answer to make to one who has no right to question me,” she said.  “But, should I have to pay with my life for the moment of happiness I should feel in placing my hand in the hand of a hero, I would grasp that moment!”

“Then,” cried Menko, “you wish to push me to extremities!  And yet I have told you there are certain hours of feverish insanity in which I am capable of committing a crime.”

“I do not doubt it,” replied the young girl, coldly.  “But, in fact, you have already done that.  There is no crime lower than that of treachery.”

“There is one more terrible,” retorted Michel Menko.  “I have told you that I loved you.  I love you a hundred times more now than ever before.  Jealousy, anger, whatever sentiment you choose to call it, makes my blood like fire in my veins!  I see you again as you were.  I feel your kisses on my lips.  I love you madly, passionately!  Do you understand, Marsa?  Do you understand?” and he approached with outstretched hands the Tzigana, whose frame was shaken with indignant anger.  “Do you understand?  I love you still.  I was your lover, and I will, I will be so again.”

“Ah, miserable coward!” cried the Tzigana, with a rapid glance toward the daggers, before which stood Menko, preventing her from advancing, and regarding her with eyes which burned with reckless passion, wounded self-love, and torturing jealousy.  “Yes, coward!” she repeated, “coward, coward to dare to taunt me with an infamous past and speak of a still more infamous future!”