“‘Why will you not marry me?’ she asked, and he said, ‘I do not wish to marry.’ So for a time they sat silent, and then she said, ‘Do not forget me,’ and went away.
“He told me these things, and I said to him, ‘She was an ora.’ He said, ‘Yes, I know.’ I said, ‘Was she a gypsy ora?’ For, as you know, there are two kinds of ora, and if she were a gypsy ora I would have been troubled for my friend. He said, ‘No, she was a lady ora.’ We spoke no more about it.
“Three years went by, to a day, and again it happened that my friend was sitting alone in his house, making a cup of coffee in the ashes of the fire, when again the door opened.”
The man of Ipek stopped speaking, opened his silver tobacco box, and put a pinch of the long, fine, golden tobacco on a cigarette paper. He spread it carefully, twisted it into the cone shape of the Albanian cigarette, glanced at us to see that none of our cigarette holders were empty, and placed the white slender cone between his lips. He lighted it and drew several deliberate puffs. No one spoke. There was the red circle of firelight, the graceful black and white and colored figures huddled close to it, around us the shadows of the house, and beyond them the vast, murmurous blackness of the night and the mountains; the chill and mystery of them seemed to be pressing against the stone walls that kept them out, and the sound of the waterfall was like the sighing breaths of strange, wild things.
“My friend was sitting by his fire, like this, but he was alone. It was the third coming of that day of the year on which the ora had come out of the darkness, and when again the door opened he knew, without turning to see, who it was.
“She came in, and he turned and said, ‘Long life to you!’ Then he saw that with her was a manservant, and that manservant was of her own kind. She said to my friend, ‘And to you long life!’ She sat by the fire, and he gave her coffee, and she drank, and the manservant stood in the shadows behind them.
“‘Have you forgotten me?’ she said, and my friend said, ‘No.’ They looked at each other, and she said, ‘Am I not beautiful?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ Then she leaned close to him and said, ‘Will you marry me?’ And he said, ‘No.’
“When he said that she rose, and she was more beautiful angry than she had been before. She said: ‘Come with me. My father wishes to see you.’
“He said, ‘What have I to do with your father?’
“She said, ‘Come with me.’