al
manner, and letting a silence fall before she said, in a level and
unemotional voice:

"Sit down, Dandy, and stop shouting. There's no use getting the
town-guard out because you chance not to want me any longer for a wife.
You don't have to have me, you know!"

He seemed somewhat dashed by this, and there was a pause, during which
he took a paper from his pocket and cast it on the table before her.

"No," he says, "and that's very true; but for your own sake as the Lord
of Stair's daughter, I'd write no more verses like these. God!" he
cried, "to think of that white-faced American having a thing like that
from you!"

"What's the matter with the writing?" she said, looking down at it as
though its literary merit were the thing he questioned. "Mr. Hastings,"
she explained, "had an old song called the Trail of the Gipsies, and he
rather flouted me because I set such store by it, but had it lined and
sent me with some flowers. On the minute of their coming, and with the
thought of how little the Anglo-Saxon comprehends any race save his
own, I wrote these lines. I see no harm in them!"

As Nancy read the poem[7] over she looked up with the same curious look.

[7] A thousand thanks for the verses,
And the thoughts that they bring from you,
But it's only a gipsy-woman
Who can feel how the trail holds true.

You of the Pilgrim fathers,
With your face so proud and pale,
And the birth born pain of a fettered brain,
What can ye know of the trail?

By the lawless folk who bore me,
By their passion and pain, and loss,
By their swords which strove and their Lights o' Love,
I've a right to the gipsy cross.

* * * * *

Poems by Nancy Stair. Edinburgh Edition, 1796.

"What's the matter with it?" she asked again.

"The matter with it?" he repeated after her. "It's a thing no lady
should ever have thought, and no woman should ever have written."

"Ye think so?" she said, and there was an amused tolerance in her voice
as of discussing a mature subject with a child, adding in a tone as
remote as if speaking of the Tenant Act, "Your opinions are always
interesting, Dand."

"Interesting to you they may or may not be, but it's just come to this:
A young woman who continues the relations you do with the greatest
scoundrel on earth; who writes verses