broken, there's the penalty, and it has to be met."

Ingolby stopped knitting for a moment. "You don't mean that a penalty
could touch you?" he asked incredulously.

"Not for breaking a law," she answered. "I'm not a Gipsy any more.
I gave my word about that, and so did my father; and I'll keep it."

"Please tell me about it," he urged. "Tell me, so that I can understand
everything."

There was a long pause in which Ingolby inspected carefully with his
fingers the work which he was doing, but at last Fleda's voice came to
him, as it seemed out of a great distance, while she began to tell of her
first memories: of her life by the Danube and the Black Sea, and drew
for him a picture, so far as she could recall it, of her marriage with
Jethro, and of the years that followed. Now and again as she told of
some sordid things, of the challenge of the law in different countries,
of the coarse vagabondage of the Gipsy people in this place or in that,
and some indignity put upon her father, or some humiliating incident, her
voice became low and pained. It seemed as if she meant that he should
see all she had been in that past, which still must be part of the
present and have its place in the future, however far away all that
belonged to it would be. She appeared to search her mind to find that
which would prejudice him against her. While speaking with slow scorn
of the life which she had lived as a Gipsy, yet she tried to make him
understand, too, that, in the days when she belonged to it, it all seemed
natural to her, and that its sordidness, its vagabondage did not produce
repugnance in her mind when she was part of it. Unwittingly she over-
coloured the picture, and he knew she did.