s had a fall," he said.

Her heart beat fast for an instant, and then the presentiment came to
her that the man spoke the truth. In the presence of the accomplished
thing, she became calm.

"What has happened?" she asked quietly.

"He went prowling in Manitou, and in Barbazon's Tavern they struck him
down."

"Who struck him down?" she asked. It seemed to her that the night-bird
sang so loud that she could scarcely hear her own voice.

"A drunken Gorgio," he replied. "The horseshoe is for luck all the world
over, and it brought its luck to Manitou to-night. It struck down a
young Master Gorgio who in white beard and long grey hair went spying."

She knew in her heart that he spoke the truth. "He is dead?" she asked
in a voice that had a strange quietness.

"Not yet," he answered. "There is time to wish him luck."

She heard the ribald laugh with a sense of horror and loathing. "The
hand that brought him down may have been the hand of a Gorgio, but
behind the hand was Jethro Fawe," she said in a voice grown passionate
again. "Where is he?" she added.

"At his own house. I watched them take him there. It is a nice
house--good enough for a Gorgio house-dweller. I know it well. Last
night I played his Sarasate fiddle for him there, and I told him all
about you and me, and what happened at Starzke, and then--"

"You told him I was a Romany, that I was married to you?" she asked in a
low voice.

"I told him that, and asked him why he thought you had deceived him, had
held from him the truth. He was angry and tried to kill me."

"That is a lie," she answered. "If he had tried to kill you he would
have done so."

Suddenly she realized the situation as it was--that she was standing
at her window in the night, scantily robed, talking to a man in a tree
opposite her window; and that the man had done a thing which belonged to
the wild places which she had left so far behind.

It flashed into her mind--what would Max Ingolby think of such a thing?
She flushed. The new Gorgio self of her flushed, and yet the old Romany
self, the child of race and heredity had taken no exact account of the
strangeness of this situation. It had not seemed unnatural. Even if he
had been in her room itself, she would have felt no tithe of the shame
that she felt now in asking herself what the Master Gorgio would think,
if he knew. It was not that she had less modesty, that any stir of sex
was in her veins where the Romany chal was concern