d creature of
a virgin world, whom sleep had captured and tamed; for, behind the
refinement which education and the vigilant influence with which Madame
Bulteel had surrounded her, there was in her the spirit of primitive
things: of the open road and the wilderness, of the undisciplined and
vagrant life, however marked by such luxury as the ruler of all the
Romanys could buy and use in pilgrimage. There was that in her which
would drag at her footsteps in this new life.

For a full hour or more she slept, then there crept through the
fantasies of sleep something that did not belong to sleep--again
something from the wakeful world, strange, alien, troubling. At first
it was only as though a wind stirred the air of dreams, then it was like
the sounds that gather behind the coming rage of a storm, and again
it was as though a night-prowler plucked at the sleeve of a home-goer.
Presently, with a stir of fright and a smothered cry, she waked to a
sound which was not of the supernatural or of the mind's illusions,
but no less dreadful to her because of that. In some cryptic way it
was associated with the direful experience through which she had just
passed.

What she heard in the darkness was a voice which sang there by her
window--at it or beneath it--the words of a Romany song.

It was a song of violence, which she had heard but a short time before
in the trees behind her father's house, when a Romany claimed her as his
wife:

"Time was I went to my true love,
Time was she came to me--"

Only one man would sing that song at her window, or anywhere in this
Western world. This was no illusion of her overwrought senses. There,
outside her window, was Jethro Fawe.

She sat up and listened, leaning on one arm, and staring into the
half-darkness beyond the window, the blind of which she had not drawn
down. There was no moon, but the stars were shining brightly, relieving
the intensity of the dark. Through the whispering of the trees, and
hushing the melancholy of a night-bird's song, came the wild low note of
the Romany epic of vengeance. It had a thrill of exultation. Something
in the voice, insistent, vibrating, personal, made every note a thrust
of victory. In spite of her indignation at the insolent serenade,
she thrilled; for the strain of the Past was in her, and it had been
fighting with her all night, breaking in upon the Present, tugging at
the cords of youth.

The man's daring roused her ad