the layers of scarlet and yellow and blue handkerchiefs, which filled up the space the loose-fitting gown of bright merino left open, was of a breadth fully worthy of her height.  A silk handkerchief of deep blood-red colour was bound round her head, not in the modern Gypsy fashion, but more like an Oriental turban.  From each ear was suspended a massive ring of red gold.  Round her beautiful, towering, tanned neck was a thrice-twisted necklace of half-sovereigns and amber and red coral.  She looked me full in the face.  Then came a something in the girl’s eyes the like of which I had seen in no other Gypsy’s eyes, though I had known well the Gypsies who used to camp near Rington Manor, not far from Raxton, for my kinsman Percy Aylwin, the poet, had lately fallen in love with Winnie’s early friend, Rhona Boswell.  It was not exactly an ‘uncanny’ expression, yet it suggested a world quite other than this.  It was an expression such as one might expect to see in a ‘budding spae-wife,’ or in a Roman Sibyl.  And whose expression was it that it now reminded me of?  But the remarkable thing was that this expression was intermittent; it came and went like the shadows the fleeting clouds cast along the sunlit grass.  Then it was followed by a look of steady self-reliance and daring.  This last variation of expression was what now suddenly came into her eyes as she said, scrutinising me from head to foot: 

’Reia, you make a good git-up for a Romany-chal.  Can you rokkra Romanes?  No, I see you can’t.  I should ha’ took you for the right sort.  I should ha’ begun the Romany rokkerpen with you, only you ain’t got the Romany glime in your eyes.  It’s a pity he ain’t got the Romany glime, ain’t it, Jim?’

She turned to a young Gypsy fellow who was sitting at the other end of the settle, drinking also from a pot of ale, and smoking a cutty pipe.

‘Don’t ax me about no mumply Gorgio’s eyes,’ muttered the man, striking the leather legging of his right leg with a silver-headed whip he carried.  ‘You’re allus a-takin’ intrust in the Gorgios, and yet you’re allus a-makin’ believe as you hate ’em.’

‘You say Winifred Wynne is back again?’ I cried in an eager voice.

’That’s jist what I did say, and I ain’t deaf, my rei.  How she managed to get back here puzzles me, poor thing, for she’s jist for all the world like Rhona’s daddy’s daddy, Opi Bozzell, what buried his wits in his dead wife’s coffin.  She’s even skeared at me.’

‘Why, you don’t mean to say Winnie’s back!’ cried the landlord.  ’To think that I shouldn’t have heard about Winnie Wynne bein’ back.  When did you see her, Sinfi?’

‘I see her fust ever so many nights ago.  I was comin’ down this road, when what do I see but a gal a-kicking at the door of Mrs. Davies’s emp’y house, and a-sobbin’ she was jist fit to break her heart, and I sez to myself, as I looked at her—­“Now, if it was possible for that ’ere gal to be Winifred Wynne, she’d be Winifred Wynne, but as it ain’t possible for her to be Winifred Wynne, it ain’t Winifred Wynne, and any mumply Gorgie [Footnote] as ain’t Winifred Wynne may kick and sob for a blue moon for all me."’