Like a wind she had swept out of childhood into a woman's world where the
eyes saw things unseen before, a world how many thousand leagues in the
future; and here in a flash, also, she was swept like a wind back again
to a time before there was even conscious childhood--a dim, distant time
when she lived and ate and slept for ever in the field or the vale, in
the quarry, beside the hedge, or on the edge of harvest-fields; when she
was carried in strong arms, or sat in the shelter of a man's breast as a
horse cantered down a glade, under an ardent sky, amid blooms never seen
since then. She was whisked back into that distant, unreal world by the
figure of a young Romany standing beside a spruce-tree, and by her
father's voice which uttered the startling words: "He says he is your
husband!"
Indignation and a bitter pride looked out of her eyes, as she heard the
preposterous claim--as though she were some wild dweller of the jungle
being called by her savage mate back to the lair she had forsaken.
"Since when were you my husband?" she asked Jethro Fawe composedly.
Her quiet scorn brought a quiver to his spirit; for he was of a people to
whom anger and passion were part of every relationship of life, its
stimulus and its recreation, its expression of the individual.
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