"'Mi Duvel', but who would think--ah, did you hear me call then?" he
asked, rising from the plank couch where he had been sitting. He showed
his teeth in a smile which was meant to be a welcome, but it had an
involuntary malice.

"I heard you singing," she answered composedly, "but I do not come here
because I'm called."

"But I do," he rejoined. "You called me from over the seas, and I came.
I was in the Balkans; there was trouble--Servia, Montenegro, and Austria
were rattling the fire-irons again, and there was I as my father was
before me. But I heard you calling, and I came."

"You never heard me call, Jethro Fawe," she returned quietly. "My
calling of you is as silent as the singing of the stars, where you are
concerned. And the stars do not sing."

"But the stars do sing, and you call just the same," he responded with a
twist to his moustache, and posing against the wall. "I've heard the
stars sing. What's the noise they make in the heart, if it's not
singing? You don't hear with the ears only. The heart hears. It's only
a manner of speaking, this talk about the senses. One sense can do the
same as all can do and a Romany ought to know how to use one or all.
When your heart called I heard it, and across the seas I came. And by
long and by last, but I was right in coming."

His impudence at once irritated her and provoked her admiration. She
knew by instinct how false he was, and how a lie was as common with him
as the truth; but his submission to her father, his indifference to his
imprisonment, forced her interest, even as she was humiliated by the fact