e armed?" he questioned.

"Am I the only woman that has armed herself against you and such as you?
Do you not see?"

"Mi Duvel, but I do see now with a thousand eyes!" he said hoarsely.

His senses were reeling. Down beneath everything had been the thought
that, as he had prevailed with other women, he could prevail with her;
that she would come to him in the end. He had felt, but he had declined
to see, the significance of her bearing, of her dress, of her speech,
of her present mode of life, of its comparative luxury, its social
distinction of a kind which lifted her above even the Gorgios by whom
she was surrounded. A fatuous belief in himself and in his personal
powers had deluded him. He had told the truth when he said that no woman
had ever appealed to him as she did; that she had blotted out all other
women from the book of his adventurous and dissolute life; and he had
dreamed a dream of conquest of her when Fortune should hand out to him
the key of the situation. Did not the beautiful Russian countess on the
Volga flee from her liege lord and share his 'tan'? When he played
his fiddle to the Austrian princess, did she not give him a key to
the garden where she walked of an evening? And this was a Romany lass,
daughter of his Chieftain, as he was son of a great Romany chief; and
what marvel could there be that she who had been made his child wife,
should be conquered as others had been!

"'Mi Duvel', but I see!" he repeated in a husky fierceness. "I am your
husband, but you would have killed me if I had taken a kiss from your
lips, sealed to me by all our tribes and by your father and mine."

"My lips are my own, my life is my own, and when I marry, I shall marry
a man of my own choosing, and he will not be a Romany," she replied with
a look of resolution which her beating heart belied. "I'm not a pedlar's
basket."

"'Kek! Kek'! That's plain," he retorted. "But the 'wolf' is no lamb
either! I said I would not go till your father set me free, since you
had no right to do so, but a wife should save her husband, and her
husband should set himself free for his wife's sake"--his voice rose in
fierce irony--"and so I will now go free. But I will not take the word
to the Romany people that you are no more of them. I am a true Romany. I
disobeyed my 'Ry' in coming here because my wife was here, and I wanted
her. I am a true Romany husband who will not betray his wife to her
people; but I will have my way, and no G