, her brown fingers clutching at mine,
she flung up her nostrils, craving air.

This was the picture of the woman who could not weep in her misery.

'Kiomi, old friend!' I called to her. I could have cursed that other
friend, the son of mischief; for she, I could have sworn, had been
fiercely and wantonly hunted. Chastity of nature, intense personal
pride, were as proper to her as the free winds are to the heaths: they
were as visible to dull divination as the milky blue about the iris of
her eyeballs. She had actually no animal vileness, animal though she
might be termed, and would have appeared if compared with Heriot's
admirable Cissies and Gwennies, and other ladies of the Graces that
run to fall, and spend their pains more in kindling the scent of the
huntsman than in effectively flying.

There was no consolation for her.

The girl Eveleen came in sight, loitering and looking, kicking her idle
heels.

Kiomi turned sharp round to me.

'I'm going. Your father's here, up at Bulsted. I'll see him. He won't
tell. He'll come soon. You'll be fit to walk in a day. You're sound as a
nail. Goodbye--I shan't say good-bye twice,' she answered my attempt
to keep her, and passed into the tent, out of which she brought a small
bundle tied in a yellow handkerchief, 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 l