Zara came to where the man knelt.

“My beautiful one! my rosebud!” she murmured.  “Pietro, the sun shines on nothing half so lovely in this lower world!”

“And yet the black, bad blood of the Gitana flows in her veins, too.  She is a Spanish gypsy, as her mother and grandmother before her.  Nay, not her mother, since the blue blood of all the Kingsland’s flows in her veins.”

“Never!” cried Zara, her eyes ablaze.  “If I thought one drop of that man’s bitter blood throbbed in my heart, the first knife I met should let it forth.  Look at me!” she wildly cried, “look at me, Pietro—­Zara, your wife!  Have I one look of him or his abhorred English race?”

“My Zara, no!  You are Sir Jasper Kingsland’s daughter, but there is no look of the great Sir Jasper in your gypsy face, nor in the face of our darling, either.  She is all our own!”

“I would strangle her in her cradle, dearly as I love her, else!” the woman said, her passionate face aflame.  “Pietro, my blood is like liquid fire when I think of him and my mother’s wrongs.”

“Wait, Zara—­wait.  The wheel will turn and our time come.  And now for breakfast!”

She whipped off the pot, removed the lid, and a savory gush of steam filled the room.  The man Pietro laughed.

“Our poached hare smells appetizing.  Keep the choicest morsel for the mother, Zara, and tell her I will be with her presently.  There!  Achmet the Astrologer lies in a heap.”

He had deftly taken off his flowing cloak, his long, silvery beard and hair, and flung them together in a corner, and now he stood in the center of the room, a stalwart young fellow of thirty or thereabouts, with great Spanish eyes and profuse curling hair of an inky blackness.

“Let me but wash this white enamel off my face,” he said, giving himself a shake, “and Pietro is himself again.  Sir Jasper would hardly recognize Achmet, I fancy, if he saw him now.”

He walked to a shelf on which was placed a wash-bowl and towel, and plunged his face and head into the cold water.  Five minutes’ vigorous splashing and rubbing, and he emerged, his pallid face brown as a berry, his black hair in a snarl of crisp curls.

“And now to satisfy the inner man,” he said, walking over to the pot, seizing a wooden spoon, and drawing up a cricket.  “My tramp of last night and this morning has made me famously hungry, Zara.”

“And the hare soup is good,” said Zara.  “While you breakfast, Pietro, I will go to mother.  Come up when you finish.”

A steep stair-way that was like a ladder led to the loft.  Zara ascended this with agile fleetness, and the late astrologer was left alone at his very unmagician-like work of scraping the pot with a wooden spoon.  Once or twice, as the fancy crossed him of the contrast between Achmet, the Astrologer reading the stars, and Pietro the tramp scraping the bones of the stolen hare, he laughed grimly to himself.