reat fire, whose
flames licked the heavens, and seemed to devour a Romany tent standing
alone with a Romany wagon full of its household things.

As Jethro Fawe had spoken, the misty, elusive visions had become living
memories, and she knew that he had spoken the truth, and that these
fleeting things were pictures of her sealing to Jethro Fawe and the
death of Lemuel Fawe, and the burning of all that belonged to him in
that last ritual of Romany farewell to the dead.

She knew now that she had been bargained for like any slave--for three
thousand pounds. How far away it all seemed, how barbaric and revolting!
Yet here it all was rolling up like a flood to her feet, to bear her
away into a past with its sordidness and vagabondage, however gilded and
graded above the lowest vagabondage.

Here at Manitou she had tasted a free life which was not vagabondage,
the passion of the open road which was not an elaborate and furtive
evasion of the law and a defiance of social ostracism. Here she and her
father moved in an atmosphere of esteem touched by mystery, but not
by suspicion; here civilization in its most elastic organization and
flexible conventions, had laid its hold upon her, had done in this
expansive, loosely knitted social system what could never have been
accomplished in a great city--in London, Vienna, Rome, or New York. She
had had here the old free life of the road, so full of the scent of deep
woods--the song of rivers, the carol of birds, the murmuring of trees,
the mysterious and devout whisperings of the night, the happy communings
of stray peoples meeting and passing, the gaiety and gossip of the
market-place, the sound of church bells across a valley, the storms and
wild lightnings and rushing torrents, the cries of frightened beasts,
the wash and rush of rain, the sharp pain of frost, and the agonies of
some lost traveller rescued from the wide inclemency, the soft starlight
after, the balm of the purged air, and "rosy-fingered morn" blinking
blithely at the world. The old life of the open road she had had here
without anything of its shame, its stigma, and its separateness, its
discordance with the stationary forces of law and organized community.

Wild moments there had been of late years when she longed for the faces
of Romany folk gathered about the fire, while some Romany 'pral' drew
all hearts with the violin or the dulcimer. When Ambrose or Gilderoy or
Christo responded to the pleadings of some sen