he wore well over
her forehead. Her eyes were large and brown, the long eyebrows were coal
black. Her nose was straight and thin and the mouth full and red. Withal
she was of a somewhat lighter hue than her father or the rest of the
gipsy tribe. Yet there was something of a darker grain than the grain in
her people that lurked beneath her skin. And she was light on her feet.
Even trudging in the deep snow, she seemed more to float, to skim on
top, than to walk.

Unconcerned she had listened to the conversation that had gone on
between her father and the Tartar in the hut of the boatman. She had
hardly been interested in the whole affair, yet, when Mehmet Ali
mentioned casually as soon as he was outdoors that he knew a man who
would pay twenty pieces of gold for such a wife as Fanutza was, she
became interested in the conversation.

"I sell horses only," Marcu answered quietly.

"Yet my friend and others from his tribe have bought wives. Remember
that beautiful Circassian girl?" the Tartar continued without raising or
lowering his voice.

"Yes, Mehmet, we buy wives but we don't sell them."

"Which is not fair," Mehmet reflected aloud still in the same voice.

By that time they had reached the river shore. Mehmet, after rolling
together the oil cloth that had covered the boat, helped the gipsy chief
and his daughter to the stern. With one strong push of the oar on the
shore rock, the Tartar slid his boat a hundred feet towards the middle
of the stream. Then he seated himself, face towards his passengers, and
rowed steadily without saying a single word. The gipsy chief lit his
short pipe and looked over his friend's head, trying to distinguish the
other shore from behind the curtain of falling snow. The boat glided
slowly over the thickening waters of the Danube. A heavy snowstorm, the
heaviest of the year, lashed the river. When Mehmet had finally moored
his boat to the Roumanian side of the Danube, he turned around to the
gipsy chief and said:

"Be back before sundown. It shall be my last crossing of the year. For
when the sun rises the waters will be frozen still. The gale blows from
the land of the Russians."

"As you tell me, friend," answered Marcu while helping his daughter out
of the boat.

When the two had gone a short distance Fanutza turned her head. Mehmet
Ali was leaning on an oar and looking after them. A little later, a
hundred paces further, she caught fragments of a Tartar song that
reached her