"'Mi Duvel', but I see!" he repeated in a husky fierceness. "I am your husband, but you would have killed me if I had taken a kiss from your lips, sealed to me by all our tribes and by your father and mine."
"My lips are my own, my life is my own, and when I marry, I shall marry a man of my own choosing, and he will not be a Romany," she replied with a look of resolution which her beating heart belied. "I'm not a pedlar's basket."
"'Kek! Kek'! That's plain," he retorted. "But the 'wolf' is no lamb either! I said I would not go till your father set me free, since you had no right to do so, but a wife should save her husband, and her husband should set himself free for his wife's sake"—his voice rose in fierce irony—"and so I will now go free. But I will not take the word to the Romany people that you are no more of them. I am a true Romany. I disobeyed my 'Ry' in coming here because my wife was here, and I wanted her. I am a true Romany husband who will not betray his wife to her people; but I will have my way, and no Gorgio shall take her to his home. She belongs to my tent, and I will take her there."
Her gesture of contempt, anger and negation infuriated him. "If I do not take you to my 'tan', it will be because I'm dead," he said, and his white teeth showed fiercely.
"I have set you free. You had better go," she rejoined quietly.
Suddenly he turned at the doorway. A look of passion burned in his eyes.
His voice became soft and persuasive. "I would put the past behind me,
and be true to you, my girl," he said. "I shall be chief over all the
Romany people when Duke Gabriel dies. We are sib; give me what is mine.
I am yours—and I hold to my troth. Come, beloved, let us go together."
A sigh broke from her lips, for she saw that, bad as he was, there was a moment's truth in his words. "Go while you can," she said. "You are nothing to me."
For an instant he hesitated, then, with a muttered oath, sprang out into the bracken, and was presently lost among the trees.
For a long time she sat in the doorway, and again and again her eyes filled with tears. She felt a cloud of trouble closing in upon her. At last there was the sound of footsteps, and a moment later Gabriel Druse came through the trees towards her. His eyes were sullen and brooding.
"You have set him free?" he asked.