and walked away, without nodding or
speaking.

'What was that you said to Kiomi?' I questioned Eveleen, who was quickly
beside me.

She replied, accurately or not: 'I told her our men'd give her as good as
she gave me, let her wait and see.'

Therewith she pouted; or, to sketch her with precision, 'snouted' would
better convey the vivacity of her ugly flash of features. It was an error
in me to think her heartless. She talked of her aunt Kiomi
affectionately, for a gipsy girl, whose modulated tones are all addressed
to the soft public. Eveleen spoke with the pride of bated breath of the
ferocious unforgivingness of their men. Perhaps if she had known that I
traced the good repute of the tribes for purity to the sweeter instincts
of the women, she would have eulogized her sex to amuse me. Gipsy girls,
like other people, are fond of showing off; but it would have been a
victory of education to have helped her to feel the distinction of the
feminine sense of shame half as awfully and warmly as she did the
inscrutable iron despotism of the males. She hinted that the mistake of
which I had been the victim would be rectified.

'Tell your men I'll hunt them down like rats if I hear of it,' said I.

While we were conversing my father arrived. Eveleen, not knowing him,
would have had me accept the friendly covering of a mat.

'Here 's a big one! he's a clergyman,' she muttered to herself, and ran
to him and set up a gipsy whine, fronting me up to the last step while
she advanced; she only yielded ground to my outcry.

My father bent over me. Kiomi had prepared him for what he saw. I quieted
his alarm by talking currently and easily. Julia Bulsted had despatched a
messenger to inform him of my mysterious disappearance; but he, as his
way was, revelling in large conjectures, had half imagined me seized by a
gust of passion, and bound for Germany. 'Without my luggage?' I laughed.

'Ay, without your luggage, Richie,' he answered seriously. His conceit of
a better knowledge of me than others possessed, had buoyed him up. 'For I
knew,' he said, 'we two do nothing like the herd of men. I thought you
were off to her, my boy. Now!' he looked at me, and this look of dismay
was a perfect mirror. I was not a presentable object.

He stretched his limbs on the heather and kept hold of my hand, looking
and talking watchfully, doctor-like, doubting me to be as sound in body
as I assured him I was, despite aches and pains. Eveleen hung