“Yes, that he does!” said the young girl, frankly; “and I beg his pardon for my pettishness.”

Zelma Burleigh, as she stood thus, a faint, regretful smile softening the habitual hauteur of her face, was beautiful, and something more; yet nobody in the country round about the Grange had ever dreamed of calling her “a beauty.”  She was a tall, gracefully-formed girl, with that strong, untamable character of figure and feature, and that peculiar, sun-tinted, forest-shadowed hue of the skin, which betray the slightest admixture of gypsy blood.  In fact, Zelma Burleigh was the fruit of a strange mesalliance between the younger brother of the Squire, a reckless, dissipated soldier of fortune, and a beautiful Spanish Zineala, whom he met in a foreign campaign, and whom he could not bind to himself by any tie less honorable than marriage.  She was said to be of Rommany blood-royal, and was actually disowned by her tribe for her mesalliance.  She followed the camp for a few years, the willing, though sad and fast-fading slave of her Ishmaelitish lord, himself the slave of lawless passions, yet not wholly depraved, —­fitfully tender and tyrannic,—­and when, at last, he fell in some inglorious skirmish, she buried him with her own hands, and wept and fasted over his shallow grave till she died.  There was a child, but she had no look of the father to charm that poor, broken heart back to life; she was left in the camp and became a little “Daughter of the Regiment.”  At last, however, she was taken to England by a faithful comrade of the dead soldier, who sought out her uncle and left her in his care, taking leave of the frightened, clinging little creature with a grim, unspoken tenderness, and a strange quiver of his gray moustache.

Roger Burleigh, after having made himself sure of the legitimacy of the child, adopted the poor, wild thing, made her the companion of his daughter, and honestly strove to treat her, at all times, with parental care and affection.

Here, in the hospitable circle of an English home, the orphan alien had grown up with her kinsfolk, but not of them,—­proud, reticent, ambitious, secretly hating the monotonous duties and pursuits, the decorous forms and prescribed pleasures of the social and domestic life around her.  Nomadic and lawless instincts stirred in her blood; vague longings for freedom and change, though in wandering, peril, and want, sometimes filled her soul with the spirit of revolt and unrest.

In her bluff uncle’s house all were kind, and one, at least, was fond.  Her Cousin Bessie, gay and tender heart, had found the southern exposure of her nature, and had crept up it, and clambered over it, and clasped it, and bloomed against it, and ripened on it, till nothing cold, hard, or defiant could be seen on that side.  And Zelma seemed well content to be the sombre background and strong support of so much bloom, sweetness, and graceful dependence.