timental lass, and sang to
the harpist's strings:

"Cold blows the wind over my true love,
Cold blow the drops of rain;
I never, never had but one sweetheart;
In the green wood he was slain,"

and to cries of "Again! 'Ay bor'! again!" the blackeyed lover,
hypnotizing himself into an ecstasy, poured out race and passion and war
with the law, in the true Gipsy rant which is sung from Transylvania to
Yetholm or Carnarvon or Vancouver:

"Time was I went to my true love,
Time was she came to me--"

The sharp passion which moved her now as she stood before Jethro Fawe
would not have been so acute yesterday; but to-day--she had lain in a
Gorgio's arms to-day; and though he was nothing to her, he was still a
Gorgio of Gorgios; and this man before her--her husband--was at best but
a man of the hedges and the byre and the clay-pit, the quarry and the
wood; a nomad with no home, nothing that belonged to what she was now a
part of--organized, collective existence, the life of the house-dweller,
not the life of the 'tan', the 'koppa', and the 'vellgouris'--the tent,
the blanket, and the fair.

"I was never bought, and I was never sold," she said to Jethro Fawe at
last "not for three thousand pounds, not in three thousand years. Look
at me well, and see whether you think it was so, or ever could be so.
Look at me well, Jethro Fawe."

"You are mine--it was so done seventeen years ago," he answered,
defiantly and tenaciously.

"I was three years old, seventeen years ago," she returned quietly,
but her eyes forced his to look at her, when they turned away as though
their light hurt him.

"It is no matter," he rejoined. "It is the way of our people. It has
been so, and it will be so while there is a Romany tent standing or
moving on."

In his rage Gabriel Druse could keep silence no longer.

"Rogue, what have you to say of such things?" he growled. "I am the head
of all. I pass the word, and things are so and so. By long and by last,
if I pass the word that you shall sleep the sleep, it will be so, my
Romany 'chal'."

His daughter stretched out her hand to stop further speech from her
father--"Hush!" she said maliciously, "he has come a long way for
naught. It will be longer going back. Let him have his say. It is his
capital. He has only breath and beauty."

Jethro shrank from the sharp irony of her tongue as he would not have
shrunk before her father's violence. Biting rej