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ONE:"I wonder if Reuben's still at it?" said Harry, as the footpath began to skirt the new land.

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ONE:"I do not see my way to helping Flightshot while I have so many other calls upon me. Richard is still unsettled, and unable entirely to support himself. I should be a poor friend indeed if after having induced my prot��g�� to abandon his home and rely on me, I should forsake him before he was properly established. Be a man, Ralph, and refuse to sell any more land to that greedy, selfish, unscrupulous old Backfield."

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ONE:But it was for other reasons that Reuben most wished that Harry would die. Harry was a false note, a discord in his now harmonious scheme. He was a continual reminder of the power of Boarzell, and would occasionally sweep Reuben's thoughts away from those fat corn-fields licking at the crest to that earliest little patch down by Totease, where the Moor had drunk up its first blood. He called himself a fool, but he could not help seeing something sinister and fateful in Harry, scraping tunelessly at his fiddle, or repeating over and over again some wandering echo from the outside world which had managed to reach his dungeoned brain. Reuben wished he would die, and so did the farm-boy who slept with him, and the dairy-woman who fed him at meals.

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ONE:"Keep your seat, pretty dame," said De Boteler. "That is a stout silk. For whom are you working these bright colours?"The tents and stalls were blocked as usual round the central crest of pines. It was all much as it had been five years ago on the day of the Riot. There was the outer fringe of strange dwellings��tents full of smoke and sprawling squalling children, tilt carts with soup-pots hanging from their axles over little fires, and[Pg 60] gorgeously painted caravans which stood out aristocratically amidst the prevalent sacking. There was a jangle of voices��the soft Romany of the gipsies, the shriller cant of the pikers and half-breeds, the broad drawling Sussex of the natives. Head of all the Fair, and superintending the working of the crazy merry-go-round, was Gideon Teazel, a rock-like man, son, he said, of a lord and a woman of the Rosamescros or Hearnes. He stood six foot eight in his boots and could carry a heifer across his shoulders. His wife Aurora, a pure-bred gipsy, told fortunes, and was mixed up in more activities than would appear from her sleepy manner or her invariable position, pipe in mouth, on the steps of her husband's caravan. Gideon loved to display his devotion for her by grotesque endearments and elephantine caresses��due no doubt to the gaujo strain in him, for the true gipsies always treated their women in public as chattels or beasts of burden, though privately they were entirely under their thumbs.

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ONE:"We've come," sobbed Tilly, "we've come to beg you to be merciful.""A week!"

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ONE: