ever done. Then--even then, she felt the thing
which all lovers, actual, or in the making, feel--that they must do
something for the being who to them is more than all else and all
others. She was not in love with Ingolby. How could she be in love with
this man she had seen but a few times--this Gorgio. Why was it that even
as they talked together now, she felt the real, true distance between
them--of race, of origin, of history, of life, of circumstance? The hut
in the wood where Gabriel Druse had carried Jethro Fawe was not three
hundred yards away.

She sighed, stirred, and a wild look came in her eyes--a look of
rebellion or of protest. Presently she recovered herself. She was a
creature of sudden moods.

"What is it you want to do with Manitou and Lebanon?" she asked after a
pause in which the thoughts of both had travelled far.

"You really wish to know--you don't know?" he asked with sudden
intensity.

She regarded him frankly, smiled, then she laughed outright, showing her
teeth very white and regular and handsome. The boyish eagerness of his
look, the whimsical twist of his mouth, which always showed when he was
keenly roused--as though everything that really meant anything was part
of a comet-like comedy--had caused her merriment. All the hidden things
in his face seemed to open out into a swift shrewdness and dry candour
when he was in his mood of "laying all the cards upon the table."

"I don't know," she answered quietly. "I have heard things, but I should
like to learn the truth from you. What are your plans?"

Her eyes were burning with inquiry. She was suddenly brought to the
gateways of a new world. Plans--what had she or her people to do with
plans! What Romany ever constructed anything? What did the building of
a city or a country mean to a Romany 'chal' or a Romany 'chi', they who
lived from field to field, from common to moor, from barn to city
wall. A Romany tent or a Romany camp, with its families, was the whole
territory of their enterprise, designs and patriotism. They saw the
thousand places where cities could be made, and built their fires on the
sites of them, and camped a day, and were gone, leaving them waiting and
barren as before. They travelled through the new lands in America from
the fringe of the Arctic to Patagonia, but they raised no roof-tree;
they tilled no acre, opened no market, set up no tabernacle: they had
neither home nor country.

Fleda was the heir of all this, th