arly?" she asked
ironically.

"No one has got up earlier than me lately," he sneered.

"All the days are not begun," she remarked calmly.

"You have picked up quite an education since you left the road and the
tan," he said with the look of one who delivers a smashing blow.

"I am not yet educated enough to know how you get other people to commit
your crimes for you," she retorted.

"Who commits my crimes for me?" His voice was sharp and even anxious.

"The man who told you I was once a Gipsy--Jethro Fawe."

Her instinct had told her this was so. But had Jethro told all? She
thought not. It would need some catastrophe which threw him off his
balance to make him speak to a Gorgio of the inner things of Romany
life; and child--marriage was one of them.

He scoffed. "Once a Gipsy always a Gipsy. Race is race, and you can't
put it off and on like--your stocking."

He was going to say chemise, but race was race, and vestiges of native
French chivalry stayed the gross simile on the lips of the degenerate.
Fleda's eyes, however, took on a dark and brooding look which, more
than anything else, showed the Romany in her. With a murky flood of
resentment rising in her veins, she strove to fight back the half-savage
instincts of a bygone life. She felt as though she could willingly
sentence this man to death as her father had done Jethro Fawe that very
morning. Another thought, however, was working and fighting in her--that
Marchand was better as a friend than an enemy; and that while Ingolby's
fate was in the balance, while yet the Orange funeral had not taken
place and the strikes had not yet come, it might be that he could be won
over to Ingolby. Her mind was thus involuntarily reproducing Ingolby's
policy, as he had declared it to Jowett and Rockwell. It was to find
Felix Marchand's price, and to buy off his enmity--not by money, for
Marchand did not need that, but by those other coins of value which are
individual to each man's desires, passions and needs.

"Once a Frenchman isn't always a Frenchman," she replied coolly,
disregarding the coarse insolence of his last utterance. "You yourself
do not now swear faith to the tricolour or the fleur-de-lis."

He flushed. She had touched a tender nerve.

"I am a Frenchman always," he rejoined angrily. "I hate the English. I
spit on the English flag."

"Yes, I've heard you are an anarchist," she rejoined. "A man with no
country and with a flag that belongs to no country-