freedom and light; what the Romany folk
call its own 'tan', its home, though it be but home of each day's trek.
That wild spirit was now a force which understood itself in a new if
uncompleted way. It was a sword free from its scabbard.

The adventure of the Carillon Rapids had been a kind of deliverance of
an unborn thing which, desiring the overworld, had found it. A few hours
ago the face of Ingolby, as she waked to consciousness in his arms, had
taught her something suddenly; and the face of Felix Marchand had taught
her even more. Something new and strange had happened to her, and her
father's uncouth but piercing mind saw the change in her. Her quick,
fluttering moods, her careless, undirected energy, her wistful
waywardness, had of late troubled and vexed him, called on capacities in
him which he did not possess; but now he was suddenly aware that she had
emerged from passionate inconsistencies and in some good sense had found
herself.

Like a wind she had swept out of childhood into a woman's world where
the eyes saw things unseen before, a world how many thousand leagues in
the future; and here in a flash, also, she was swept like a wind back
again to a time before there was even conscious childhood--a dim,
distant time when she lived and ate and slept for ever in the field
or the vale, in the quarry, beside the hedge, or on the edge of
harvest-fields; when she was carried in strong arms, or sat in the
shelter of a man's breast as a horse cantered down a glade, under an
ardent sky, amid blooms never seen since then. She was whisked back
into that distant, unreal world by the figure of a young Romany standing
beside a spruce-tree, and by her father's voice which uttered the
startling words: "He says he is your husband!"

Indignation and a bitter pride looked out of her eyes, as she heard the
preposterous claim--as though she were some wild dweller of the jungle
being called by her savage mate back to the lair she had forsaken.

"Since when were you my husband?" she asked Jethro Fawe composedly.

Her quiet scorn brought a quiver to his spirit; for he was of a people
to whom anger and passion were part of every relationship of life, its
stimulus and its recreation, its expression of the individual.

His eyelids trembled, but he drew himself together. "Seventeen years
ago by the River Starzke in the Roumelian country, it was so done," he
replied stubbornly. "You were sealed to me, as my Ry here knows, and as