you will remember, if you fix your mind upon it. It was beyond the city
of Starzke three leagues, under the brown scarp of the Dragbad Hills.
It was in the morning when the sun was by a quarter of its course. It
happened before my father's tent, the tent of Lemuel Fawe. There you and
I were sealed before our Romany folk. For three thousand pounds which my
father gave to your father, you--"

With a swift gesture she stopped him. Walking close up to him, she
looked him full in the eyes. There was a contemptuous pride in her face
which forced him to lower his eyelids sulkily.

He would have understood a torrent of words--to him that would have
regulated the true value of the situation; but this disdainful composure
embarrassed him. He had come prepared for trouble and difficulty, but he
had rather more determination than most of his class and people, and his
spirit of adventure was high. Now that he had seen the girl who was
his own according to Romany law, he felt he had been a hundred times
justified in demanding her from her father, according to the pledge and
bond of so many years ago. He had nothing to lose but his life, and he
had risked that before. This old man, the head of the Romany folk, had
the bulk of the fortune which had been his own father's and he had the
logic of lucre which is the most convincing of all logic. Yet with the
girl holding his eyes commandingly, he was conscious that he was asking
more than a Romany lass to share his 'tan', to go wandering from Romany
people to Romany people, king and queen of them all when Gabriel Druse
had passed away. Fleda Druse would be a queen of queens, but there was
that queenliness in her now which was not Romany--something which was
Gorgio, which was caste, which made a shivering distance between them.

As he had spoken, she saw it all as he described it. Vaguely, cloudily,
the scene passed before her. Now and again in the passing years had
filmy impressions floated before her mind of a swift-flowing river and
high crags, and wooded hills and tents and horsemen and shouting, and
a lad that held her hand, and banners waved over their heads, and
galloping and shouting, and then a sudden quiet, and many men and women
gathered about a tent, and a wailing thereafter. After which, in
her faint remembrance, there seemed to fall a mist, and a space of
blankness, and then a starting up from a bed, and looking out of the
doors of a tent, where many people gathered about a g