Biting rejection was in her tones.
He knew dimly that the thing he shrank from belonged to nothing Romany in
her, but to that scornful pride of the Gorgios which had kept the Romany
outside the social pale.
"Only breath and beauty!" she had said, and that she could laugh at his
handsomeness was certain proof that it was not wilfulness which rejected
his claims. Now there was rage in his heart greater than had been in that
of Gabriel Druse.
"I have come a long way for a good thing," he said with head thrown back,
"and if 'breath and beauty' is all I bring, yet that is because what my
father had in his purse has made my 'Ry' rich"--he flung a hand out
towards Gabriel Druse--"and because I keep to the open road as my father
did, true to my Romany blood. The wind and the sun and the fatness of the
field have made me what I am, and never in my life had I an ache or a
pain. You have the breath and the beauty, too, but you have the gold
also; and what you are and what you have is mine by the Romany law, and
it will come to me, by long and by last."
Fleda turned quietly to her father. "If it is true concerning the three
thousand pounds, give it to him and let him go. It will buy him what he
would never get by what he is."
The old man flashed a look of anger upon her.
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