will make the man pay who spoils his home. It is all he has. Good or
bad, it is all he has. It is his own."

Ingolby had a strange, disturbing premonition that he was about to hear
what would startle him, but he persisted. "You said you had come here to
get your own--is your home here?"

For a moment the Romany did not answer. He had worked himself into a
great passion. He had hypnotized himself, he had acted for a while as
though he was one of life's realities; but suddenly there passed through
his veins the chilling sense of the unreal, that he was only acting
a part, as he had ever done in his life, and that the man before him
could, with a wave of the hand, raise the curtain on all his disguises
and pretences. It was only for an instant, however, for there swept
through him the feeling that Fleda had roused in him--the first real
passion, the first true love--if what such as he felt can be love--that
he had ever known; and he saw her again as she was in the but in the
wood defying him, ready to defend herself against him. All his erotic
anger and melodramatic fervour were alive in him once more.

He was again a man with a wrong, a lover dispossessed. On the instant
his veins filled with passionate blood. The Roscian strain in him had
its own tragic force and reality.

"My home is where my own is, and you, have taken my own from me, as I
said," he burst out. "There was all the world for you, but I had only my
music and my wife, and you have taken my wife from me. 'Mi Duvel', you
have taken, but you shall give back again, or there will be only one of
us in the world! The music I have played for you--that has told you all:
the thing that was music from the beginning of Time, the will of the
First of All. Fleda Druse, she was mine, she is my wife, and you, the
Gorgio, come between, and she will not return to me."

A sudden savage desire came to Ingolby to strike the man in the
face--this Gipsy vagabond the husband of Fleda Druse! It was too
monstrous. It was an evil lie, and yet she had said she was a Romany,
and had said it with apparent shame or anxiety. She had given him no
promise, had pledged no faith, had admitted no love, and yet already in
his heart of hearts he thought upon her as his own. Ever since the day
he had held her in his arms at the Carillon Rapids her voice had sounded
in his ears, and a warmth was in his heart which had never been there
in all his days. This waif of barbarism even to talk of Fle