I write of her in the style consonant to my ideas of her at the time.
I would have carried her off on the impulse and lived her life, merely to
have had such a picture moving in my sight, and call it mine.

'You're not married?' I said, ludicrously faintly.

'I 've not seen the man I'd marry,' she answered, grinning scorn.

The prizefighter had adopted drinking for his pursuit; one of her aunts
was dead, and she was in quest of money to bury the dead woman with the
conventional ceremonies and shows of respect dear to the hearts of
gipsies, whose sense of propriety and adherence to customs are a
sentiment indulged by them to a degree unknown to the stabled classes.
In fact, they have no other which does not come under the definite title
of pride;--pride in their physical prowess, their dexterity, ingenuity,
and tricksiness, and their purity of blood. Kiomi confessed she had
hoped to meet me; confessed next that she had been waiting to jump out on
me: and next that she had sat in a tree watching the Grange yesterday for
six hours; and all for money to do honour to her dead relative, poor
little soul! Heriot and I joined the decent procession to the grave.
Her people had some quarrel with the Durstan villagers, and she feared
the scandal of being pelted on the way to the church. I knew that
nothing of the sort would happen if I was present. Kiomi walked humbly
with her head bent, leaving me the thick rippling coarse black locks of
her hair for a mark of observation. We were entertained at her camp in
the afternoon. I saw no sign of intelligence between her and Heriot.
On my asking her, the day before, if she remembered him, she said, 'I do,
I'm dangerous for that young man.' Heriot's comment on her was impressed
on me by his choosing to call her 'a fine doe leopard,' and maintaining
that it was a defensible phrase.