murdered in cold blood, and trying to get at them as shot him down. Well, I’ve lived through them five years; I’m a tough un to kill. You think of it, lad--you as lives as I lived for the most part, under the sky, with the free air blowing in your face all day--think what prison is: Four bare walls, a dog’s work in front of you, and a slave-driver to see as you do it; and all the while eating your heart out with knowing it was unjust, the cruel injustice of a titled scoundrel as had broken your sister’s heart, and made a jailbird of you, and murdered your father. And all for what? For his own dirty pride--pride of his family, as are no older than us Carewes; pride that I’ll humble in the dust yet, if I spend the rest of my life in quod for it.” “There ain’t no talk of quod for this business of ours, dearie,” put in the old crone, as she stirred the fire with a bent iron stick. “You shall have your revenge, sure enough, and so will I. Your _dadi_ Hiram was my own first-born, that I’d seen grow up from the stoutest and prettiest _kinchin_ to the finest man in the country-side. And my eyes have seen what yours have not: your sister, my bonny Clare, as she lay dying in my arms, making me swear on her child’s head that I would punish Philip Cranstoun. ‘He swore he would break my pride,’ she said, with the death-rattle in her throat. ‘_Mami_, break his. Disgrace is worse than death to him. He has brought death upon me; bring disgrace upon him.’ I seem to hear her voice now, and to see her glazing eyes light up for the last time as she said the words.” She sat still for a while, staring into the flaming logs over the outstretched figure of James Carewe. A wonderful Rembrandtesque study they would have made, those three generations of gypsies, had any Dutch painter been there to fix the scene on canvas, with its sombre tone lit by the ruddy firelight. The woman, in her heavy cloak, the hood fallen back, and disclosing a faded red and yellow silk handkerchief wound round her head, from which scattered white elf locks fell over her wrinkled brow and sunken cheeks. Only a great artist could have reproduced the look in her glittering black eyes, a look that took in a past of wrongs and sufferings, and brooded in cruel, anticipative joy over a future of revenge.