le farmhouse, and,
sitting down under the mulberry trees, wait until the farmer's wife
brought her some newly baked bread and a cup of milk, warm from the
cows. Then she would remain idly there, surrounded by chickens, ducks,
and great, greedy geese, which she fed, breaking the bread between her
white fingers, while Duna and Bundas crouched at her feet, pricking up
their ears, and watching these winged denizens of the farmyard, which
Marsa forbade them to touch. Finally the Tzigana would slowly wend her
way home, enter the villa, sit down before the piano, and play, with
ineffable sweetness, like souvenirs of another life, the free and
wandering life of her mother, the Hungarian airs of Janos Nemeth, the
sad "Song of Plevna," the sparkling air of "The Little Brown Maid of
Budapest," and that bitter; melancholy romance, "The World holds but One
Fair Maiden," a mournful and despairing melody, which she preferred
to all others, because it responded, with its tearful accents, to a
particular state of her own heart.

The girl was evidently concealing some secret suffering. The bitter
memory of her early years? Perhaps. Physical pain? Possibly. She had
been ill some years before, and had been obliged to pass a winter at
Pau. But it seemed rather some mental anxiety or torture which impelled
the Tzigana to seek solitude and silence in her voluntary retreat.

The days passed thus in that villa of Maisons-Lafitte, where Tisza died.
Very often, in the evening, Marsa would shut herself up in the solitude
of that death-chamber, which remained just as her mother had left it.
Below, General Vogotzine smoked his pipe, with a bottle of brandy for
company: above, Marsa prayed.

One night she went out, and through the sombre alleys, in the tender
light of the moon, made her way to the little convent in the Avenue
Egle, where the blue sisters were established; those sisters whom she
often met in the park, with their full robes of blue cloth, their white
veils, a silver medallion and crucifix upon their breasts, and a rosary
of wooden beads suspended at their girdles. The little house of the
community was shut, the grating closed. The only sign of life was in the
lighted windows of the chapel.

Marsa paused there, leaning her heated brow against the cold bars of
iron, with a longing for death, and a terrible temptation to end all by
suicide.

"Who knows?" she murmured. "Perhaps forgetfulness, deep, profound
forgetfulness, lies within