“You have warned me against imprudence,” she said.

“I want,” Gavin continued, earnestly, “to know your people, your father and mother.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he answered, stoutly, “I like their daughter.”

At that Babbie’s fingers played on one of the pans, and, for the moment, there was no more badinage in her.

“You are a good man,” she said, abruptly; “but you will never know my parents.”

“Are they dead?”

“They may be; I cannot tell.”

“This is all incomprehensible to me.”

“I suppose it is.  I never asked any one to understand me.”

“Perhaps not,” said Gavin, excitedly; “but the time has come when I must know everything of you that is to be known.”

Babbie receded from him in quick fear.

“You must never speak to me in that way again,” she said, in a warning voice.

“In what way?”

Gavin knew what way very well, but he thirsted to hear in her words what his own had implied.  She did not choose to oblige him, however.

“You never will understand me,” she said.  “I daresay I might be more like other people now, if—­if I had been brought up differently.  Not,” she added, passionately, “that I want to be like others.  Do you never feel, when you have been living a humdrum life for months, that you must break out of it, or go crazy?”

Her vehemence alarmed Gavin, who hastened to reply—­

“My life is not humdrum.  It is full of excitement, anxieties, pleasures, and I am too fond of the pleasures.  Perhaps it is because I have more of the luxuries of life than you that I am so content with my lot.”

“Why, what can you know of luxuries?”

“I have eighty pounds a year.”

Babble laughed.  “Are ministers so poor?” she asked, calling back her gravity.

“It is a considerable sum,” said Gavin, a little hurt, for it was the first time he had ever heard any one speak disrespectfully of eighty pounds.

The Egyptian looked down at her ring, and smiled.

“I shall always remember your saying that,” she told him, “after we have quarrelled.”

“We shall not quarrel,” said Gavin, decidedly.

“Oh, yes, we shall.”

“We might have done so once, but we know each other too well now.”

“That is why we are to quarrel.”

“About what?” said the minister.  “I have not blamed you for deriding my stipend, though how it can seem small in the eyes of a gypsy—­”

“Who can afford,” broke in Babbie, “to give Nanny seven shillings a week?”

“True,” Gavin said, uncomfortably, while the Egyptian again toyed with her ring.  She was too impulsive to be reticent except now and then, and suddenly she said, “You have looked at this ring before now.  Do you know that if you had it on your finger you would be more worth robbing than with eighty pounds in each of your pockets?”