dras's eyes. No,
again and forever no: it was much better to take the love which fate
offered her in exchange for her life.

And, as she threw herself back in her chair with an expression of
unchangeable determination in her dark, gazelle-like eyes, there
suddenly came into her mind the memory of a day long ago, when, driving
along the road from Maisons-Lafitte to Saint-Germain, she had met some
wandering gipsies, two men and a woman, with copper-colored skins and
black eyes, in which burned, like a live coal, the passionate melancholy
of the race. The woman, a sort of long spear in her hand, was driving
some little shaggy ponies, like those which range about the plains of
Hungary. Bound like parcels upon the backs of these ponies were four or
five little children, clothed in rags, and covered with the dust of the
road. The woman, tall, dark and faded, a sort of turban upon her head,
held out her hand toward Marsa's carriage with a graceful gesture and a
broad smile--the supplicating smile of those who beg. A muscular young
fellow, his crisp hair covered with a red fez, her brother--the woman
was old, or perhaps she was less so than she seemed, for poverty brings
wrinkles--walked by her side behind the sturdy little ponies. Farther
along, another man waited for them at a corner of the road near a
laundry, the employees of which regarded him with alarm, because, at the
end of a rope, the gipsy held a small gray bear. As she passed by
them, Marsa involuntarily exclaimed, in the language of her mother "Be
szomoru!" (How sad it is!) The man, at her words, raised his head, and
a flash of joy passed over his face, which showed, or Marsa thought so
(who knows? perhaps she was mistaken), a love for his forsaken country.
Well, now, she did not know why, the remembrance of these poor beings
returned to her, and she said to herself that her ancestors, humble and
insignificant as these unfortunates in the dust and dirt of the highway,
would have been astonished and incredulous if any one had told them that
some day a girl born of their blood would wed a Zilah, one of the chiefs
of that Hungary whose obscure and unknown minstrels they were! Ah! what
an impossible dream it seemed, and yet it was realized now.

At all events, a man's death did not lie between her and Zilah. Michel
Menko, after lying at death's door, was cured of his wounds. She knew
this from Baroness Dinati, who attributed Michel's illness to a sword
wound secretly