want to do all
sorts of things. Do you remember the story of Marguerite of France,
who heard the gypsies singing under her window and leant out and called
to them to take her away. I feel like that. Do you understand?"

Vardri drew her closer. "I know, my heart. Tell me more."

"There were some gypsies singing under my window this morning,"
Arithelli went on. "I wished I could have gone out and followed them
'over the hills and far away' like the children in the old rhymes. The
Irish and Jewish people have always been wanderers. Perhaps that is
why I am fated never to stay long in one place."

He answered her in the same mood.

"We'll start at once, shall we, Fatalite? We'll saddle two of the
horses and ride, ride day and night till we come to Montserrat, and
there we shall find your gypsies and their tribe. When you come to my
country there'll be gypsies too, and they shall play and sing for you,
and you'll know what music is for the first time."

"How foolish we are!" Her eyes were wet, but she was smiling. "If
Emile heard me talking like this he would be so angry."

"He talked like this once," Vardri replied. "Poleski was young too not
so very long ago, and he loved someone."

"Yes, I know." She found it almost impossible to think of Emile as a
lover in spite of the photograph she had found, and the words in his
own writing upon his songs. She knew them by heart. "_Emile a Marie.
Sans toi la mort_." And on another, "_Etoile de mon ame! Je vous
adore de tout mon coeur, ton Emile_."

Perhaps it was the memory of this passion of his youth that had made
him kind to her.

While they talked and lingered, Sobrenski was descending the rickety
ladder that served as a staircase.

He had noticed Vardri's exit from the room, as he noticed everything
else. All the other men had been too excited to care whether one more
or less was there or not. In the hot argument that raged in the upper
room, the absence of one of the members of the Brotherhood was
apparently forgotten.

Their leader, however, did not lose his head or his powers of
observation even when matters of life or death were in the balance.
Whatever he did was always done deliberately and in cold blood.

All the time he had been apparently presiding over the discussion he
had also been thinking rapidly.

It would be to his ultimate advantage not to interfere with Arithelli
and Vardri just now, but to let them be together, to see as mu