her appeal, Jethro raised his head. His courage came back, the old
insolent self-possession took hold of him again. The sentence which the
Ry had passed was worse than death (and it meant death, too), for it
made him an outcast from his people, and to be outcast was to be thrown
into the abyss. It was as though a man without race or country
was banished into desolate space. In a vague way he felt its full
significance, and the shadow of it fell on him.

"No, no, no," Fleda repeated hoarsely, with that new sense of
responsibility where Jethro was concerned.

Jethro's eyes were turned upon her now. In the starlit night, just
yielding to the dawn, she could faintly see his burning look, could
feel, as it were, his hands reach out to claim her; and she felt that
while he lived she was not wholly free. She realized that the hand of
nomad, disorderly barbarism was dragging her with a force which was
inhuman, or, maybe, superhuman.

Gabriel Druse could know nothing of the elements fighting in his
daughter's soul; he only knew that her interest in the Master Gorgio was
one he had never seen before, and that she abhorred the Romany who had
brought Ingolby low. He had shut his eyes to the man's unruliness and
his daughter's intervention to free him; but now he was without pity. He
had come from Ingolby's bedside, and had been told a thing which shook
his rugged nature to its centre--a thing sad as death itself, which he
must tell his daughter.

To Fleda's appeal he turned a stony face. There was none of that rage
in his words which had marked the scene when Jethro Fawe first came to
claim what he could not have. There was something in him now more deadly
and inevitable. It made him like some figure of mythology, implacable,
fateful. His great height, his bushy beard and stormy forehead, the eyes
over which shaggy eyebrows hung like the shrubs on a cliff-edge, his
face lined and set like a thing in bronze--all were signs of a power
which, in passion, would be like that of OEdipus: in the moment of
justice or doom would, with unblinking eyes, slay and cast aside as
debris is tossed upon the dust-heap.

As he spoke now his voice was toneless. His mind was flint, and his
tongue was but the flash of the flint. He looked at his daughter for a
moment with no light of fatherhood in his face, then turned from her
to Jethro Fawe with slow decision and a gesture of authority. His eyes
fastened on the face of the son of Lemuel Fawe, as