Fawe, his
Romany subject--and, according to the laws of the Romany tribes, his
son-in-law. It did not matter that the girl--but three years of age when
it happened--had no memory of the day when the chiefs and great people
assembled outside the tent of Lemuel Fawe when he lay dying, and, by
the simple act of stepping over a branch of hazel, the two children were
married: if Romany law and custom were to abide, then the two now were
man and wife. Did not Lemuel Fawe, the old-time rival of Gabriel Druse
for the kinship of the Romanys, the claimant whose family had been
rulers of the Romanys for generations before the Druses gained
ascendancy--did not Fawe, dying, seek to secure for his son by marriage
what he had failed to get for himself by other means?

All these things had at one time been part of Gabriel Druse's covenant
of life, until one year in England, when Fleda, at twelve years of age,
was taken ill and would have died, but that a great lady descended upon
their camp, took the girl to her own house, and there nursed and tended
her, giving her the best medical aid the world could produce, so that
the girl lived, and with her passionate nature loved the Lady Barrowdale
as she might have loved her own mother, had that mother lived and she
had ever known her. And when the Lady Barrowdale sickened and died of
the same sickness which had nearly been her own death, the promise she
made then overrode all other covenants made for her. She had promised
the great lady who had given her own widowed, childless life for her
own, that she would not remain a Gipsy, that she would not marry a
Gipsy, but that if ever she gave herself to any man it would be to a
Gorgio, a European, who travelled oftenest "the open road" leading to
his own door. The years which had passed since those tragic days in
Gloucestershire had seen the shadows of that dark episode pass, but the
pledge had remained; and Gabriel Druse had kept his word to the dead,
because of the vow made to the woman who had given her life for the life
of a Romany lass.

The Romany tribes of all the nations did not know why their Ry had
hidden himself in the New World; they did not know that the girl had
for ever forsworn their race, and would never become head of all the
Romanys, solving the problem of the rival dynasties by linking her life
with that of Jethro Fawe. But Jethro Fawe had come to claim his own.

Now Gabriel Druse's eyes followed his own menacing finger with