"I was never bought, and I was never sold," she said to Jethro Fawe at
last "not for three thousand pounds, not in three thousand years. Look at
me well, and see whether you think it was so, or ever could be so. Look
at me well, Jethro Fawe."
"You are mine--it was so done seventeen years ago," he answered,
defiantly and tenaciously.
"I was three years old, seventeen years ago," she returned quietly, but
her eyes forced his to look at her, when they turned away as though their
light hurt him.
"It is no matter," he rejoined. "It is the way of our people. It has been
so, and it will be so while there is a Romany tent standing or moving
on."
In his rage Gabriel Druse could keep silence no longer.
"Rogue, what have you to say of such things?" he growled. "I am the head
of all. I pass the word, and things are so and so. By long and by last,
if I pass the word that you shall sleep the sleep, it will be so, my
Romany 'chal'."
His daughter stretched out her hand to stop further speech from her
father--"Hush!" she said maliciously, "he has come a long way for naught.
It will be longer going back. Let him have his say. It is his capital. He
has only breath and beauty."
Jethro shrank from the sharp irony of her tongue as he would not have
shrunk before her father's violence.
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