ch you?" he asked incredulously.

"Not for breaking a law," she answered. "I'm not a Gipsy any more. I
gave my word about that, and so did my father; and I'll keep it."

"Please tell me about it," he urged. "Tell me, so that I can understand
everything."

There was a long pause in which Ingolby inspected carefully with his
fingers the work which he was doing, but at last Fleda's voice came to
him, as it seemed out of a great distance, while she began to tell of
her first memories: of her life by the Danube and the Black Sea, and
drew for him a picture, so far as she could recall it, of her marriage
with Jethro, and of the years that followed. Now and again as she
told of some sordid things, of the challenge of the law in different
countries, of the coarse vagabondage of the Gipsy people in this place
or in that, and some indignity put upon her father, or some humiliating
incident, her voice became low and pained. It seemed as if she meant
that he should see all she had been in that past, which still must be
part of the present and have its place in the future, however far away
all that belonged to it would be. She appeared to search her mind to
find that which would prejudice him against her. While speaking with
slow scorn of the life which she had lived as a Gipsy, yet she tried to
make him understand, too, that, in the days when she belonged to it, it
all seemed natural to her, and that its sordidness, its vagabondage did
not produce repugnance in her mind when she was part of it. Unwittingly
she over-coloured the picture, and he knew she did.

In spite of herself, however, some aspects of the old life called forth
pictures of happy Nature, of busy animal life of wood and glen and
stream and footpath which was exquisite in its way. She was in spirit at
one with the multitudinous world of nature among which so many men and
women lived, without seeing or knowing. It was all undesignedly a part
of herself, and she was one of a population in a universal nation whose
devout citizen she was. Sometimes, in response to an interjection from
Ingolby, deftly made, she told of some incident which revealed as great
a poetic as dramatic instinct. As she talked, Ingolby in his imagination
pictured her as a girl of ten or twelve, in a dark-red dress, brown
curls falling in profusion on her shoulders, with a clear, honest,
beautiful eye, and a face that only spoke of a joy of living, in which
the small things were the small things