"The little one sleeps," the man said, casting a swift glance over at
the pallet. "Our pretty baby, Zara. Ah, if Sir Jasper Kingsland loves
his first-born son as we love our child, or half so well, we are almost
avenged already!"

"He had need to love it better than his first-born daughter!" Zara
said, fiercely. "The lion loves its whelp, the tiger its cub; but he,
less human than the brutes, casts off his offspring in the hour of its
birth!"

"Meaning yourself, my Zara?" the man said, with his slow, soft smile.
"What would you have, degraded daughter of a degraded mother--his toy
of an hour? And there is another daughter--a fair-haired, insipid
nonentity of a dozen years, no more like our beautiful one here than a
farthing rush-light is like the stars of heaven."

He drew down the tattered quilt, and gazed with shining eyes of love
and admiration at the sleeping face of a child, a baby girl of scarce
two years, the cherub face rosy with sleep, smiling in her dreams; the
long, silky black lashes sweeping the flushed cheek; the abundant,
feathery, jet-black curls floating loosely about--an exquisite picture
of blooming, healthful, beautiful childhood.

Zara came to where the man knelt.

"My beautiful one! my rosebud!" she murmured. "Pietro, the sun shines
on nothing half so lovely in this lower world!"

"And yet the black, bad blood of the Gitana flows in her veins, too.
She is a Spanish gypsy, as her mother and grandmother before her. Nay,