“I suppose you will not come any more to the Rue Murillo, then?”

“Certainly I shall—­to see you.”

And it really was to see her that the Prince went to the Baroness Dinati’s, where his melancholy characteristics clashed with so many worldly follies and extravagances.  The Baroness seemed to have a peculiar faculty in choosing extraordinary guests:  Peruvians, formerly dictators, now become insurance agents, or generals transformed into salesmen for some wine house; Cuban chiefs half shot to pieces by the Spaniards; Cretes exiled by the Turks; great personages from Constantinople, escaped from the Sultan’s silken bowstring, and displaying proudly their red fez in Paris, where the opera permitted them to continue their habits of polygamy; Americans, whose gold-mines or petroleum-wells made them billionaires for a winter, only to go to pieces and make them paupers the following summer; politicians out of a place; unknown authors; misunderstood poets; painters of the future-in short, the greater part of the people who were invited by Prince Andras to his water-party, Baroness Dinati having pleaded for her friends and obtained for them cards of invitation.  It was a sort of ragout of real and shady celebrities, an amusing, bustling crowd, half Bohemian, half aristocratic, entirely cosmopolitan.  Prince Andras remembered once having dined with a staff officer of Garibaldi’s army on one side of him, and the Pope’s nuncio on the other.

On a certain evening the Baroness was very anxious that the Prince should not refuse her latest invitation.

“I am arranging a surprise for you,” she said.  “I am going to have to dinner”—­

“Whom?  The Mikado?  The Shah of Persia?”

“Better than the Mikado.  A charming young girl who admires you profoundly, for she knows by heart the whole history of your battles of 1849.  She has read Georgei, Klapka, and all the rest of them; and she is so thoroughly Bohemian in heart, soul and race, that she is universally called the Tzigana.”

“The Tzigana?”

This simple word, resembling the clank of cymbals, brought up to Prince Andras a whole world of recollections.  ‘Hussad czigany’!  The rallying cry of the wandering musicians of the puszta had some element in it like the cherished tones of the distant bells of his fatherland.

“Ah! yes, indeed, my dear Baroness,” he said; “that is a charming surprise.  I need not ask if your Tzigana is pretty; all the Tzigani of my country are adorable, and I am sure I shall fall in love with her.”

The Prince had no notion how prophetic his words were.  The Tzigana, whom the Baroness requested him to take in to dinner, was Marsa, Marsa Laszlo, dressed in one of the black toilettes which she affected, and whose clear, dark complexion, great Arabian eyes, and heavy, wavy hair seemed to Andras’s eyes to be the incarnation, in a prouder and more refined type, of the warm, supple, nervous beauty of the girls of his country.