g-ground, rather
dissatisfied with the squire.

'Speak to him yourself, Kiomi,' said I; 'whatever you ask for, he can't
refuse anything to such eyes as yours.'

'You!' she rallied me; 'why can't you talk sensible stuff!'

She had grown a superb savage, proof against weather and compliments.
Her face was like an Egyptian sky fronting night. The strong old Eastern
blood put ruddy flame for the red colour; tawny olive edged from the
red; rare vivid yellow, all but amber. The light that first looks down
upon the fallen sun was her complexion above the brows, and round the
cheeks, the neck's nape, the throat, and the firm bosom prompt to
lift and sink with her vigour of speech, as her eyes were to flash and
darken. Meeting her you swore she was the personification of wandering
Asia. There was no question of beauty and grace, for these have laws.
The curve of her brows broke like a beaten wave; the lips and nostrils
were wide, tragic in repose. But when she laughed she illuminated you;
where she stepped she made the earth hers. She was as fresh of her East
as the morning when her ancient people struck tents in the track of
their shadows. I write of her in the style consonant to my ideas of her
at the time. I would have carried her off on the impulse and lived her
life, merely to have had such a picture moving in my sight, and call it
mine.

'You're not married?' I said, ludicrously faintly.

'I 've not seen the man I'd marry,' she answered, grinning scorn.

The prizefighter had adopted drinking for his pursuit; one of her aunts
was dead, and she was in quest of money to bury the dead woman with
the conventional ceremonies and shows of respect dear to the hearts
of gipsies, whose sense of propriety and adherence to customs are a
sentiment indulged by them to a degree unknown to the stabled classes.
In fact, they have no other which does not come under the definite title
of pride;--pride in their physical prowess, their dexterity, ingenuity,
and tricksiness, and their purity of blood. Kiomi confessed she had
hoped to meet me; confessed next that she had been waiting to jump out
on me: and next that she had sat in a tree watching the Grange yesterday
for six hours; and all for money to do honour to her dead relative, poor
little soul! Heriot and I joined the decent procession to the grave. Her
people had some quarrel with the Durstan villagers, and she feared the
scandal of being pelted on the way to the church. I knew tha