“What do you wish of me?” she said. “Why do you speak to me? You must have seen what care I have taken to avoid you.”
“It is that which has wounded me to the quick. You are driving me mad. If you only knew what I am suffering!”
He spoke almost in a whisper, and very rapidly, as if he felt that seconds were worth centuries.
She answered him in a cutting, pitiless tone, harsher even than the implacable look in her dark eyes. “You suffer? Is fate so just as that? You suffer?”
Her tone and expression made Michel Menko tremble as if each syllable of these few words was a blow in the face.
“Marsa!” he exclaimed, imploringly. “Marsa!”
“My name is Marsa Laszlo; and, in a few days, I shall be Princess Zilah,” responded the young girl, passing haughtily by him, “and I think you will hardly force me to make you remember it.”
She uttered these words so resolutely, haughtily, almost disdainfully, and accompanied them with such a flash from her beautiful eyes that Menko instinctively bowed his head, murmuring:
“Forgive me!”
But he drove his nails into the palm of his clenched hand as he saw her leave that part of the boat, and retire as far from him as she could, as if his presence were an insult to her. Tears of rage started into the young man’s eyes as he watched her graceful figure resume its former posture of dreamy absorption.