a good mind to go and give him a left-hand body-blow in the ribs and settle him for good and all.  He means mischief to the Tarno Rye, and Rhona too.  Brother, I’ve noticed for a long while that the Romany blood is a good deal stronger in you than the Gorgio blood.  And now mark my words, that cuss o’ your feyther’s’ll work itself out.  You’ll go to his grave and you’ll jist put that trushul back in that tomb, and arter that, and not afore, you’ll marry Winnie Wynne.’

Sinfi’s creed did not surprise me:  the mixture of guile and simplicity in the Romany race is only understood by the few who know it thoroughly:  the race whose profession it is to cheat by fortune-telling, to read the false ‘dukkeripen’ as being ’good enough for the Gorgios,’ believe profoundly in nature’s symbols; but her bearing did surprise me.

‘Your dukkeripen will come true,’ said she; ’but mine won’t, for I won’t let it.’

‘And what is yours?’ I asked.

‘That’s nuther here nor there.’

Then she stood again as though listening to something, and again I thought, as her lips moved, that I heard her whisper, ’I will, I will.’

III

I had intended to go to London at once after leaving Gypsy Dell, but something that Sinfi told me during our interview impelled me to go on to Raxton Hall, which was so near.  The fact that Sinfi was my kinswoman opened up new and exciting vistas of thought.

I understood now what was that haunting sense of recognition which came upon me when I first saw Sinfi at the wayside inn in Wales.  Day by day had proofs been pouring in upon me that the strain of Romany blood in my veins was asserting itself with more and more force.  Day by day I had come to realise how closely, though the main current of my blood was English, I was affined to the strange and mysterious people among whom I was now thrown—­the only people in these islands, as it seemed to me, who would be able to understand a love-passion like mine.  And there were many things in the great race of my forefathers which I had found not only unsympathetic to me, but deeply repugnant.  In Great Britain it is the Gypsies alone who understand nature’s supreme charm, and enjoy her largesse as it used to be enjoyed in those remote times described in Percy Aylwin’s poems before the Children of the Roof invaded the Children of the Open Air, before the earth was parcelled out into domains and ownerships as it now is parcelled out.  In the mind of the Gorgio, the most beautiful landscape or the most breezy heath or the loveliest meadow-land is cut up into allotments, whether of fifty thousand acres or of two roods, and owned by people.  Of ownership of land the Romany is entirely unconscious.  The landscape around him is part of Nature herself, and the Romany on his part acknowledges no owner.  No doubt he yields to force majeure in the shape of gamekeeper or constable, but that is because he has no power to resist it.  Nature to him is as free and unowned by man as it was to the North American Indian in his wigwam before the invasion of the Children of the Roof.