"What matters it to us?" he replied. "Let the Gorgios fight it out among themselves, and cut each other's throats for a name, like fools as they are! King George, or King Charles, or King James, none of them will put a fowl in the Romany's kettle, nor a broad piece in his palm, but for service rendered and risk run. We must help ourselves, Thyra, take what we want, and keep all we can. Our hand may well be against every man, for is not every man's hand against us? For ages we have been a race apart, and we must continue so for ever. No Romany lad may wed with the noblest lady of the Gorgios; and for the Romany lass who listens to love in another tongue, we do not shame her before our people, but we conceal her, Thyra, we hide her away, where neither father nor mother, uncle nor aunt, Romany nor Gorgio, shall ever find her again!"
His voice had grown thick and hoarse, while drops of sweat stood on the tawny face, now turned to ashen grey. Waif trembled like a leaf.
"I know it," she said; "our people never forgive, Fin, and they never forget."
There was a ring of pride in the last sentence--tribute to the absent lover, whom even now she could not bring herself to wish she might put out of her mind.
They walked on in silence. She had taken his bundle, and thus laden carried it with a step as free and untiring as his own. They were half a mile behind the other gipsies, pacing side by side in the moonshine over the lonely down. A light twinkled from a solitary farm many a mile away, and once only was the stillness broken by the honest bark of a sheep-dog. The calm pure air, the sweet summer night, the quiet, the expanse, were all suggestive of those dreams which have so large a portion in life's reality. Her thoughts were far away beyond that western horizon, with the grey horse and its rider. She absolutely started when her companion's voice roused her from the abstraction in which she was plunged.
He had been watching her narrowly. Fin Cooper was as dexterous a gipsy as ever stalked a red-deer, noosed a hare, or swung a kettle. Versed in the lore, as in the malpractices of his people, he knew how to tell fortunes by cards or palmistry; to interpret the _patrin_ of his comrades, the signs of the zodiac, even the stars of heaven; but he could not read a woman's heart. This was the last moment he should have chosen to inculcate a lesson of fidelity and obedience on his promised wife.