The gypsies attracted him for the same reason that they repelled his brother; they were something new, something he did not understand. Ortho did not find anything very elusive about the males; they were much like other men, if quicker-witted and more suave. It was the women who intrigued and, at the same time, awed him. He had watched them at work with the cards, bent over the palm of a trembling servant girl or farm woman. What did they know? What didn’t they know? What virtue was in them that they should be the chosen mouthpieces of Destiny? He would furtively watch them about their domestic duties, stirring the black pots or nursing their half-naked brats, and wonder what secrets the Fates were even then whispering into their ringed ears, what enigmas were being made plain to those brooding eyes. He felt his soul laid bare to those omniscient eyes. But it was solely his own imagination that troubled him. The women gave him no cause; they cast none but the gentlest glances at the dark boy. Sometimes of an evening they would sing, not the green English ballads and folk-songs that were their stock-in-trade, but epics of Romany heroes, threnodies and canzonets. Pyramus was the principal soloist. He had a pliant, tuneful voice and accompanied himself on a Spanish guitar. He would squat before the fire, the women in a row opposite him, toss a verse across to them, and they would toss back the refrain, rocking to the time as though strung on a single wire. The scene stirred Ortho—the gloomy wood, the overhanging rocks, the gypsy king, guitar across his knees, trumpeting his wild songs of love and knavery; and the women and girls, in their filthy, colorful rags, seen through a film of wood smoke, swaying to and fro, to and fro, bright eyes and barbaric brass ornaments glinting in the firelight. On the outer circle children and men lay listening in the leaf mold, and beyond them invisible horses stamped and shifted at their pickets, an owl hooted, a dog barked. The scene stirred Ortho. It was so strange, and yet somehow so familiar, he had a feeling that sometime, somewhere he had seen it all before; long ago and far away he had sat in a camp like this and heard women singing. He liked the boastful, stormy songs, “Invocation to Timour,” “The Master Thief,” “The Valiant Tailor,” but the dirges carried him off, one especially. It was very sweet and sad, it had only four verses and the women sang each refrain more softly than the one before, so that the last was hardly above a whisper and dwindled into silence like the wind dying away—“aië, aië; aië, aië.” Ortho did not understand what it was about, its name even, but when he heard it he lost himself, became some one else, some one else who understood perfectly crept inside his body, forced his tears, made him sway and feel queer. Then the gypsy women across the fire would glance at him and nudge each other quietly. “See,” they would whisper, “his Rom grandfather looking out of his eyes.”