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 great fire, whose flames licked the heavens,
and seemed to devour a Romany tent standing alone with a Romany wagon
full of its household things.
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