She nodded comprehension, looked for a moment with troubled eyes down the long room to the card-players, caught herself in her momentary absentness, and said quickly: "Heaven knows there's a lot of Gypsy in some of us. I have more than full share. In spite of his bucolic proclivities, Dick is a born Gypsy. And from what he has told of you, you are hopelessly one."
"After all, the white man is the real Gypsy, the king Gypsy," Graham propounded. "He has wandered wider, wilder, and with less equipment, than any Gypsy. The Gypsy has followed in his trails, but never made trail for him.--Come; let us try it."
And as they sang the reckless words to their merry, careless lilt, he looked down at her and wondered--wondered at her--at himself. This was no place for him by this woman's side, under her husband's roof- tree. Yet here he was, and he should have gone days before. After the years he was just getting acquainted with himself. This was enchantment, madness. He should tear himself away at once. He had known enchantments and madnesses before, and had torn himself away. Had he softened with the years? he questioned himself. Or was this a profounder madness than he had experienced? This meant the violation of dear things--things so dear, so jealously cherished and guarded in his secret life, that never yet had they suffered violation.
And still he did not tear himself away. He stood there beside her, looking down on her brown crown of hair glinting gold and bronze and bewitchingly curling into tendrils above her ears, singing a song that was fire to him--that must be fire to her, she being what she was and feeling what she had already, in flashes, half-unwittingly, hinted to him.
She is a witch, and her voice is not the least of her witchery, he thought, as her voice, so richly a woman's voice, so essentially her voice in contradistinction to all women's voices in the world, sang and throbbed in his ear. And he knew, beyond shade of doubt, that she felt some touch of this madness that afflicted him; that she sensed, as he sensed, that the man and the woman were met.
They thrilled together as they sang, and the thought and the sure knowledge of it added fuel to his own madness till his voice warmed unconsciously to the daring of the last lines, as, voices and thrills blending, they sang: "'The wild hawk to the wind-swept sky, The deer to the wholesome wold, And the heart of a man to the heart of a maid As it was in the days of old-- The heart of a man to the heart of a maid, Light of my tents be fleet, Morning waits at the end of the world, And the world is all at our feet.'"