“Where did you get it?” demanded Gavin,
fiercely.
“I am sorry I told you that,” the gypsy
said, regretfully.
“Tell me how you got it,” Gavin insisted,
his face now hard.
“Now, you see, we are quarrelling.”
“I must know.”
“Must know! You forget yourself,”
she said haughtily.
“No, but I have forgotten myself too long.
Where did you get that ring?”
“Good afternoon to you,” said the Egyptian,
lifting her pans.
“It is not good afternoon,” he cried,
detaining her. “It is good-bye for ever,
unless you answer me.”
“As you please,” she said. “I
will not tell you where I got my ring. It is
no affair of yours.”
“Yes, Babbie, it is.”
She was not, perhaps, greatly grieved to hear him
say so, for she made no answer.
“You are no gypsy,” he continued, suspiciously.
“Perhaps not,” she answered, again taking
the pans.
“This dress is but a disguise.”
“It may be. Why don’t you go away
and leave me?”
“I am going,” he replied, wildly.
“I will have no more to do with you. Formerly
I pitied you, but—”
He could not have used a word more calculated to rouse
the Egyptian’s ire, and she walked away with
her head erect. Only once did she look back,
and it was to say—
“This is prudence—now.”
Circumstances leading to the first
sermon in approval of women.
A young man thinks that he alone of mortals is impervious
to love, and so the discovery that he is in it suddenly
alters his views of his own mechanism. It is
thus not unlike a rap on the funny-bone. Did
Gavin make this discovery when the Egyptian left him?
Apparently he only came to the brink of it and stood
blind. He had driven her from him for ever, and
his sense of loss was so acute that his soul cried
out for the cure rather than for the name of the malady.
In time he would have realised what had happened,
but time was denied him, for just as he was starting
for the mud house Babbie saved his dignity by returning
to him. It was not her custom to fix her eyes
on the ground as she walked, but she was doing so
now, and at the same time swinging the empty pans.
Doubtless she had come back for more water, in the
belief that Gavin had gone. He pronounced her
name with a sense of guilt, and she looked up surprised,
or seemingly surprised, to find him still there.
“I thought you had gone away long ago,”
she said stiffly.
“Otherwise,” asked Gavin the dejected,
“you would not have come back to the well?”
“Certainly not.”
“I am very sorry. Had you waited another
moment I should have been gone.”
This was said in apology, but the wilful Egyptian
chose to change its meaning.
