"She was a beautiful gipsy-girl, sister, such another as yourself, with eyes like stars, and a voice to coax the bird off a tree. She lived with her grandam, old Mother Lee, and her uncle, a stern, thick-set Romany, who seldom spoke, and never smiled. They said he killed a squire's keeper before their tribe came south out of the potato-country, and knew Norwich gaol, inside and out, as well as I know the knife in my belt. Many a time, when I was a little lad, I've seen Mary lifting the kettle off its hook before their tent; and if it hadn't been for _you_, Thyra, and the word of the Lovels, I should have thought her the likeliest lass that ever put a bodkin in a knot of black hair; so did a good many more--Stanleys, Hearnes, Coopers; she might have had the pick of them, besides the best of her own tribe, and the comeliest of the comely Lovels to boot. I've seen many a good round fought, aye, and knives drawn, too, for a chance word from Mary Lee. "And she wouldn't so much as throw away a look on the best of us! When Jack Marshall beat the Gorgio light-weight in fifty minutes, and brought her the battle-money before he had scarce washed his face or pulled his shirt on, she called him a fighting blackguard for his pains. We said in the tents that, gipsy or gentile, the man wasn't born yet who could put the charm on Mary Lee. "She did little work at home; and, except for lifting a kettle, or setting a tent-peg, kept her hands as clean as a lady's; but she went out by herself to fairs and races, _dukkering_ for the Gorgios and those who tell fortunes to the gentlefolks, and came back with gold in both hands. The old grandmother's kettle was never empty, and they gave her plenty of liberty to do what she liked. Sometimes she would stay away a month at a time. "One summer afternoon a little boy, who had been stealing nuts in a wood a mile or two from the camp, came back with a gentleman's riding-glove that he had picked up amongst the hazels. Mary laughed when she saw it, and bought it of the child for a crooked sixpence and a whistle. A week after, when they asked her what she had done with the glove, she said it was lost. That set some of our people thinking. "Then she went off again about harvest; and after she'd been gone a week, Barney Smith came into the camp, with a strange story that he had seen a Gorgio lady, the living image of Mary Lee, sitting at an open window in 'the book-fellows' town' at the time of Oxford Races. Barney was doing a little business there with a pedlar's box on his own account. Though it was a hundred miles off, he came back directly; but when he talked of the pearls and satins she wore, and the black spots on her face, with powder in her hair, we all said Barney must have been drunk or dreaming. That night her uncle sat up to put new soles on his shoes, and next morning he left the camp at daybreak.