Threading like a herd of red deer the slight undulations of the down, it took the gipsies but a few minutes to withdraw from the scene of their late outrage. In less than an hour they had approached their own camping-ground, where the tents were already pitched by wives and comrades, the kettles already singing over the twinkling fires of their bivouac. They travelled fast, at a long swinging trot, shifting their bundles from one to another as they went. Fin Cooper and Waif remained in rear of the party, the former arguing that it was the post of danger, and, on this consideration, though she seemed unwilling to lag behind the others, insisting that the girl should bear him company. Waif was anxious and preoccupied, strangely unlike herself. The black Vardo-mescro had not failed to notice the change, nor was it in his nature to keep silence when aroused. Looking suspiciously in his companion's face, he sang a scrap of an old Romany ditty, that may be thus rendered:-- "In the month of flowers, between the showers, the cuckoo sings all day. But the maiden weeps, while the Romany sleeps, and the Gorgio gallops away. Too soon, too soon, they are fading in June, and the cuckoo has changed his say. And the maiden is dead, and the spring-time fled, when the Gorgio galloped away." His voice was rich and mellow, yet something of harshness in its tones betrayed the discord within. "What do you mean by that?" asked Waif, her black eyebrows coming down in an angry scowl over her black eyes. "You can interpret it for yourself," was his answer. "Thyra, do you remember the red Quantock hills, and the deep leafy coombes in the 'broom-pickers' country' long ago?" He spoke in Romany, and she replied in the same language. It stung him to observe that she could not express herself so readily in their own gipsy tongue as in that of the Gentiles, with whom she had passed so many years. "I remember," said Waif, carelessly. "What of that?" He looked hurt, and a fierce gleam shot from his dark eyes. "There was a little gipsy-girl on those red hills," he answered, "who came to her gipsy-boy for every earthly thing she wanted, from a bunch of violets in the ditch to a bit of mistletoe on the topmost branch of the old oak-tree, who stretched her little arms for him to carry her on the tramp when she was tired, who stroked his face every morning at sunrise, and kissed him every night when he lay down to sleep.