“Babbie,” he asked, beginning to fear that he had not sounded her deepest woe, “why have you left me all this time?  You are not glad to see me now?”

“I was glad,” she answered in a low voice, “to see you from the window, but I prayed to God not to let you see me.”

She even pulled away her hand when he would have taken it.  “No, no, I am to tell you everything now, and then—­”

“Say that you love me first,” he broke in, when a sob checked her speaking.

“No,” she said, “I must tell you first what I have done, and then you will not ask me to say that.  I am not a gypsy.”

“What of that?” cried Gavin.  “It was not because you were a gypsy that I loved you.”

“That is the last time you will say you love me,” said Babbie.  “Mr. Dishart, I am to be married to-morrow.”

She stopped, afraid to say more lest he should fall, but except that his arms twitched he did not move.

“I am to be married to Lord Rintoul,” she went on.  “Now you know who I am.”

She turned from him, for his piercing eyes frightened her.  Never again, she knew, would she see the love-light in them.  He plucked himself from the spot where he had stood looking at her and walked to the window.  When he wheeled round there was no anger on his face, only a pathetic wonder that he had been deceived so easily.  It was at himself that he was smiling grimly rather than at her, and the change pained Babbie as no words could have hurt her.  He sat down on a chair and waited for her to go on.

“Don’t look at me,” she said, “and I will tell you everything.”  He dropped his eyes listlessly, and had he not asked her a question from time to time, she would have doubted whether he heard her.

“After all,” she said, “a gypsy dress is my birthright, and so the Thrums people were scarcely wrong in calling me an Egyptian.  It is a pity any one insisted on making me something different.  I believe I could have been a good gypsy.”

“Who were your parents?” Gavin asked, without looking up.

“You ask that,” she said, “because you have a good mother.  It is not a question that would occur to me.  My mother—­If she was bad, may not that be some excuse for me?  Ah, but I have no wish to excuse myself.  Have you seen a gypsy cart with a sort of hammock swung beneath it in which gypsy children are carried about the country?  If there are no children, the pots and pans are stored in it.  Unless the roads are rough it makes a comfortable cradle, and it was the only one I ever knew.  Well, one day I suppose the road was rough, for I was capsized.  I remember picking myself up after a little and running after the cart, but they did not hear my cries.  I sat down by the roadside and stared after the cart until I lost sight of it.  That was in England, and I was not three years old.”

“But surely,” Gavin said, “they came back to look for you?”