“There was no need of bloodshed to destroy that odious past,” continued Marsa.  “Ah!  I have atoned for it!  There is no one on earth who has suffered as I have.  I, who came across your path only to ruin your life!  Your life, my God, yours!”

She looked at him with worshipping eyes, as believers regard their god.

“You have not suffered so much as the one you stabbed, Marsa.  He had never had but one love in the world, and that love was you.  If you had told him of your sufferings, and confessed your secret, he would have been capable of pardoning you.  You deceived him.  There was something worse than the crime itself—­the lie.”

“Ah!” she cried, “if you knew how I hated that lie!  Would to heaven that some one would tear out my tongue for having deceived you!”

There was an accent of truth in this wild outburst of the Tzigana; and upon the lips of this daughter of the puszta, Hungarian and Russian at once, the cry seemed the very symbol of her exceptional nature.

“What is it you wish that I should do?” she said.  “Die? yes, I would willingly, gladly die for you, interposing my breast between you and a bullet.  Ah!  I swear to you, I should be thankful to die like one of those who bore your name.  But, there is no fighting now, and I can not shed my blood for you.  I will sacrifice my life in another manner, obscurely, in the shadows of a cloister.  I shall have had neither lover nor husband, I shall be nothing, a recluse, a prisoner.  It will be well! yes, for me, the prison, the cell, death in a life slowly dragged out!  Ah!  I deserve that punishment, and I wish my sentence to come from you; I wish you to tell me that I am free to disappear, and that you order me to do so—­but, at the same time, tell me, oh, tell me, that you have forgiven me!”

“I!” said Andras.

In Marsa’s eyes was a sort of wild excitement, a longing for sacrifice, a thirst for martyrdom.

“Do I understand that you wish to enter a convent?” asked Andras, slowly.

“Yes, the strictest and gloomiest.  And into that tomb I shall carry, with your condemnation and farewell, the bitter regret of my love, the weight of my remorse!”

The convent!  The thought of such a fate for the woman he loved filled Andras Zilah with horror.  He imagined the terrible scene of Marsa’s separation from the world; he could hear the voice of the officiating bishop casting the cruel words upon the living, like earth upon the dead; he could almost see the gleam of the scissors as they cut through her beautiful dark hair.

Kneeling before him, her eyes wet with tears, Marsa was as lovely in her sorrow as a Mater Dolorosa.  All his love surged up in his heart, and a wild temptation assailed him to keep her beauty, and dispute with the convent this penitent absolved by remorse.

She knelt there repentant, weeping, wringing her hands, asking nothing but pardon—­a word, a single word of pity—­and the permission to bury herself forever from the world.