a great, kind heart you've got!"

She did not reply, but sat with face hidden in her hands, rocking
backwards and forwards. He understood; he tried to help her. There was a
great joy in his heart, but he dared not give it utterance.

"Please tell me about your life--about that great change in it," he said
at last in a low voice. "Perhaps it would help me. Anyhow, I'd like to
know, if you feel you can tell me."

For a moment she was silent. Then she said to him with an anxious note
in her voice: "What do you know about my life-about the 'great change,'
as you call it?"

He reached out over the coverlet, felt for a sock which he had been
learning to knit and, slowly plying the needles, replied: "I only know
what Jethro Fawe told me, and he was a promiscuous liar."

"I don't think he lied about me," she answered quietly. "He told you I
was a Gipsy; he told you that I was married to him. That was true. I was
a Gipsy. I was married to him in the Romany way, when I was a child
of three, and I never saw him again until here, the other day, on the
Sagalac."

"You were married to him as much as I am," he interjected scornfully.
"That was a farce. It was only a promise to pay on the part of your
father. There was nothing in that. Jethro Fawe could not claim on that."

"He has tried to do so," she answered, "and if I were still a Gipsy he
would have the right to do so from his standpoint."

"That sounds silly to me," Ingolby remarked, his fingers moving now
more quickly with the needles. "No, it isn't silly," she said, her voice
almost as softly monotonous as his had been when he told her of his life
a little while before. It was as though she was looking into her own
mind and heart and speaking to herself. "It isn't silly," she repeated.
"I don't think you understand. Just because a race like the Gipsies have
no country and no home, so they must have things that bind them which
other people don't need in the same way. Being the vagrants of the
earth, so they must have things that hold them tighter than any written
laws made by King or Parliament. Unless the Gipsies kept their laws
sacred they couldn't hold together at all. They're iron and steel, the
Gipsy laws. They can't be stretched, and they can't be twisted. They
can only be broken, and then there's no argument about it. When they are
broken, there's the penalty, and it has to be met."

Ingolby stopped knitting for a moment. "You don't mean that a penalty
could tou