Then, as in a flying vision, the poor bargemen saw the steamer move farther and farther away, a long plume of smoke waving behind it.
Jacquemin, hearing one of those odd airs, which in Hungary start all feet moving and keeping time to the music, exclaimed: "A quadrille! Let us dance a quadrille! An Hungarian quadrille!" The poor people on the barge listened to the music, gradually growing fainter and fainter; and they would have believed that they had been dreaming, if the purse had not been there, a fortune for them, and the fruit which the children were eating.

The mother, without understanding, repeated that mysterious name: "The Tzigana." And Marsa also gazed after them, her ears caressed by the czardas of the musicians.

The big barge disappeared in the distance in a luminous haze; but the Tzigana could still vaguely perceive the little beings perched upon the shoulders of the men, and waving, in sign of farewell, pieces of white cloth which their mother had given them.
A happy torpor stole over Marsa; and, while the guests of the Baroness Dinati, the Japanese Yamada, the English heiresses, the embassy attaches, all these Parisian foreigners, led by Jacquemin, the director of the gayety, were organizing a ballroom on the deck, and asking the Tzigani for polkas of Fahrbach and waltzes of Strauss, the young girl heard the voice of Andras murmur low in her ear: "Ah! how I love you! And do you love me, Marsa ?" "I am happy," she answered, without moving, and half closing her eyes, "and, if it were necessary for me to give my life for you, I would give it gladly." In the stern of the boat, Michel Menko watched, without seeing them, perhaps, the fields, the houses of Pecq, the villas of Saint-Germain, the long terrace below heavy masses of trees, the great plain beside Paris with Mont Valerien rising in its midst, the two towers of the Trocadero, whose gilded dome sparkled in the sun, and the bluish-black cloud which hung over the city like a thick fog.
The boat advanced very slowly, as if Prince Andras had given the order to delay as much as possible the arrival at Maisons-Lafitte, where the whole fete would end for him, as Marsa was to land there.

Already, upon the horizon could be perceived the old mill, with its broad, slated roof.

The steeple of Sartrouville loomed up above the red roofs of the houses and the poplars which fringe the bank of the river.