Vale, an' see my
daddy, an' set your livin'-waggin to rights.'

'Then, Sinfi,' I said, 'you and I are once more--'

I stopped and looked at her. The fearless young Amazon and seeress,
who kept a large family of the Kaulo Camloes in awe, was supposed to
have nearly conquered the feminine weakness of tears; but she had
not. There was a chink in the Amazon's armour, and I had found it.

'Yis,' said she, nodding her head and smiling. 'You an' me's right
pals ag'in.'

As we were going I told her how I had replaced the jewel in the tomb.

'I know'd you would do it. Yis, I heer'd you telling the gravedigger
the same thing.'

'And yet,' said I bitterly, 'in spite of that and in spite of the
Golden Hand, she is dead.'

Sinfi stood silently looking at me now. Even her prodigious faith
seemed conquered.

IV

For a few days I paced with Sinfi over Wimbledon Common and Richmond
Park, The weather was now unusually brilliant for the time of year.
Sinfi would walk silently by my side.

But I could not rest with the Gypsies. I must be alone. Soon I left
the camp and returned to London, where I took a suite of rooms in a
house not far from Eaton Square--though to me London was a huge
meaningless maze of houses clustered around Primrose Court--that
horrid, fascinating, intolerable core of pain. Into my lungs poured
the hateful atmosphere of the city where Winifred had perished;
poured hot and stifling as sand-blasts of the desert. Impossible to
stay there!--for the pavement seemed actually to scorch my feet, like
the floor of a fiery furnace. To me the sun above was but the hideous
eye of Circumstance which had stared down pitilessly on that bare
head of hers, and blistered those feet.

The lamps at night seemed twinkling, blinking in a callous
consciousness of my tragedy--my monstrous tragedy of real life, the
like of which no poet dare imagine. But what aroused my wrath to an
unbearable pitch--what determined me to leave London at once--was the
sight of the unsympathetic faces in the streets. Though sympathy
could have given me no comfort, the myriad unsympathetic eyes of
London infuriated me.

'Died in beggar's rags--died in a hovel!' I muttered with rage as the
equipages and coarse splendours of the West End rolled insolently by.
'Died in a hovel!--and this London, this vast, ridiculous, swarming
human ant-hill, whose millions of paltry humdrum lives were not worth
one breath from those lips--this London spurned he