Did not Lemuel Fawe, the old-time rival of Gabriel Druse
for the kinship of the Romanys, the claimant whose family had been rulers
of the Romanys for generations before the Druses gained ascendancy--did
not Fawe, dying, seek to secure for his son by marriage what he had
failed to get for himself by other means?
All these things had at one time been part of Gabriel Druse's covenant of
life, until one year in England, when Fleda, at twelve years of age, was
taken ill and would have died, but that a great lady descended upon their
camp, took the girl to her own house, and there nursed and tended her,
giving her the best medical aid the world could produce, so that the girl
lived, and with her passionate nature loved the Lady Barrowdale as she
might have loved her own mother, had that mother lived and she had ever
known her. And when the Lady Barrowdale sickened and died of the same
sickness which had nearly been her own death, the promise she made then
overrode all other covenants made for her. She had promised the great
lady who had given her own widowed, childless life for her own, that she
would not remain a Gipsy, that she would not marry a Gipsy, but that if
ever she gave herself to any man it would be to a Gorgio, a European, who
travelled oftenest "the open road" leading to his own door.
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