t lay in one corner; a few broken stools were scattered
around; a few articles of clothing hung on the wall. That was all.

"The little one sleeps," the man said, casting a swift glance over at
the pallet. "Our pretty baby, Zara. Ah, if Sir Jasper Kingsland loves
his first-born son as we love our child, or half so well, we are almost
avenged already!"

"He had need to love it better than his first-born daughter!" Zara
said, fiercely. "The lion loves its whelp, the tiger its cub; but he,
less human than the brutes, casts off his offspring in the hour of its
birth!"

"Meaning yourself, my Zara?" the man said, with his slow, soft smile.
"What would you have, degraded daughter of a degraded mother--his toy
of an hour? And there is another daughter--a fair-haired, insipid
nonentity of a dozen years, no more like our beautiful one here than a
farthing rush-light is like the stars of heaven."

He drew down the tattered quilt, and gazed with shining eyes of love
and admiration at the sleeping face of a child, a baby girl of scarce
two years, the cherub face rosy with sleep, smiling in her dreams; the
long, silky black lashes sweeping the flushed cheek; the abundant,
feathery, jet-black curls floating loosely about--an exquisite picture
of blooming, healthful, beautiful childhood.

Zara came to where the man knelt.

"My beautiful one! my rosebud!" she murmured. "Pietro, the sun shines
on nothing half so lovely in this lower world!"

"And yet the black, bad blood of the Gitana flows in her veins, too.
She is a Spanish gypsy, as her mother and grandmother before her. Nay,
not her mother, since the blue blood of all the Kingsland's flows in
her veins."

"Never!" cried Zara, her eyes ablaze. "If I thought one drop of that
man's bitter blood throbbed in my heart, the first knife I met should
let it forth. Look at me!" she wildly cried, "look at me,
Pietro--Zara, your wife! Have I one look of him or his abhorred
English race?"

"My Zara, no! You are Sir Jasper Kingsland's daughter, but there is no
look of the great Sir Jasper in your gypsy face, nor in the face of our
darling, either. She is all our own!"

"I would strangle her in her cradle, dearly as I love her, else!" the
woman said, her passionate face aflame. "Pietro, my blood is like
liquid fire when I think of him and my mother's wrongs."

"Wait, Zara--wait. The wheel will turn and our time come. And now for
breakfast!"

She whipped off the pot, r