"Listen to me," she answered with anger tingling in every nerve and
fibre. "I come of your race, I was what you are, a child of the hedge
and the wood and the road; but that is all done. Home, you say! Home--
in a tent by the roadside or--"

"As your mother lived--where you were bornwell, well, but here's a Romany
lass that's forgot her cradle!"

"I have forgotten nothing. I have only moved on. I have only seen that
there is a better road to walk than that where people, always looking
behind lest they be followed, and always looking in front to find refuge,
drop the patrin in the dust or the grass or the bushes for others to
follow after--always going on and on because they dare not go back."

Suddenly he threw his cigarette on the ground, and put his heel upon it
in fury real or assumed. "Great Heaven and Hell," he exclaimed, "here's
a Romany has sold her blood to the devil! And this is the daughter of
Gabriel Druse, King and Duke of all the Romanys, him with ancestor King
Panuel, Duke of Little Egypt, who had Sigismund, and Charles the Great,
and all the kings for friends. By long and by last, but this is a tale
to tell to the Romanys of the world!" For reply she went to the door and
opened it wide. "Then go and tell it, Jethro Fawe, to all the world.
Tell them I am the renegade daughter of Gabriel Druse, ruler of them all.
Tell them there is no fault in him, and that he will return to his own
people in his own time, but that I, Fleda Druse, will never return--
never! Now, get you gone from here."

The sunlight broke through the trees, and fell in a narrow path of light
upon the doorway. A little grey bird fluttered into the radiance and
came tripping across the threshold; a whippoorwill called in the