my sight, and call it mine.

'You're not married?' I said, ludicrously faintly.

'I 've not seen the man I'd marry,' she answered, grinning scorn.

The prizefighter had adopted drinking for his pursuit; one of her aunts
was dead, and she was in quest of money to bury the dead woman with the
conventional ceremonies and shows of respect dear to the hearts of
gipsies, whose sense of propriety and adherence to customs are a
sentiment indulged by them to a degree unknown to the stabled classes. In
fact, they have no other which does not come under the definite title of
pride;--pride in their physical prowess, their dexterity, ingenuity, and
tricksiness, and their purity of blood. Kiomi confessed she had hoped to
meet me; confessed next that she had been waiting to jump out on me: and
next that she had sat in a tree watching the Grange yesterday for six
hours; and all for money to do honour to her dead relative, poor little
soul! Heriot and I joined the decent procession to the grave. Her people
had some quarrel with the Durstan villagers, and she feared the scandal
of being pelted on the way to the church. I knew that nothing of the sort
would happen if I was present. Kiomi walked humbly with her head bent,
leaving me the thick rippling coarse black locks of her hair for a mark
of observation. We were entertained at her camp in the afternoon. I saw
no sign of intelligence between her and Heriot. On my asking her, the day
before, if she remembered him, she said, 'I do, I'm dangerous for that
young man.' Heriot's comment on her was impressed on me by his choosing
to call her 'a fine doe leopard,' and maintaining that it was a
defensible phrase.

She was swept from my amorous mind by Mabel Sweetwinter, the miller's
daughter of Dipwell. This was a Saxon beauty in full bud, yellow as
mid-May, with the eyes of opening June. Beauty, you will say, is easily
painted in that style. But the sort of beauty suits the style, and the
well-worn comparisons express the well-known type. Beside Kiomi she was
like a rich meadow on the border of the heaths.

We saw them together on my twenty-first birthday. To my shame I awoke in
the early morning at Riversley, forgetful of my father's old appointment
for the great Dipwell feast. Not long after sunrise, when blackbirds peck
the lawns, and swallows are out from under eaves to the flood's face, I
was hailed by Janet Ilchester beneath my open windows. I knew she had a
bet with the squire that