The man at her feet was himself a model of rugged power and a certain swarthy beauty. His coal-black hair and beard were plentifully streaked with gray; his dark skin was unnaturally pallid, and in his sunken black eyes there lurked an expression not good to see, the look of a strong man deeply wronged, at war with society, and ripe for revenge. His dress was careless and dirty; long ago he had ceased to have any pride in his appearance, and those years of prison life, followed by the misery of police supervision, had changed him from a handsome, gallant lad, full of strength and possibilities, to a surly and brooding loafer, whose hand was against every man’s and whose whole nature was in sullen revolt against the established order of things. The third member of the group by the fire added no little to the strange picturesqueness of the scene as he leaned with folded arms against the wall, listening eagerly while his elders recounted their past experiences. Stephen Lee was grandson to Sarah’s second child, a daughter, married to a gypsy of the name of Lee. But for some years past Stephen’s lines had fallen in comparatively pleasant places, and in his smart velveteen coat, corduroy breeches, and gaiters, he formed a strong contrast to the ragged and neglected appearance of his uncle, and to the tatters of old Sarah. “You’ve got good cause to hate the gray wolf,” he said, after a pause. “I’ve been taught to hate him ever since I could speak, and I never set eyes on him without tingling to put a bullet through him. It’s the way he treats Stella as maddens me. You talked of prison just now; well, she’s imprisoned, shut in with two cursed women spies, one or the other, turn and turn about, watching her all the time. Lady Cranstoun was good to her, I will say that, for all she wasn’t her mother. But now she’s gone, that girl’s heart’s wellnigh broken; and when I pass the house at night and see the light up in her turret-window, I’m mad to burn the place down with everything and every one in it except _her_. But you two don’t know her as I do. You haven’t watched her grow up each day. She’s a regular lady, and looks down on such as me, for all I’m her cousin if she but knew it. Say what you like, _mami_, she won’t love a fellow like me. And on the tenth of May they’re going to marry her to this lord. I heard the gray wolf tell the other so, coming from the burying. Stella’s sent you that token, and you’ve got to save her. Though how in thunder you’re going to do it, and bring the disgrace upon Philip Cranstoun’s name as you talk so much about, it beats me to imagine.”