The door of the last van was open, and there, sitting on the steps in an
attitude of dull sullen idleness, was the same swarthy lass, only now she
was altered sadly! No more the proud young mother met his view, but a hard,
gaunt, evil-looking woman.
She knew him instantly, and her black eyes fiercened; as he came up close
to her she said without any greeting:
"I lost him, your honour--him and my Bill in the same blasted year, and I
ain't never had no other."
Paul stopped and peered into her brown face in the fading light.
"So we have been both through hell since then, my poor girl?" he said.
The gipsy woman laughed with bitter harshness as she echoed back the one
word "Hell!"--and afterwards she added with a wail: "Yes, they're dead! and
there won't be never no meeting."
And Paul went on--but her face haunted him.
Was there the same hard change in himself, he wondered? Was he, too,
brutalised and branded with the five years of hell? Surely if so he had
gone on a lower road than his darling would have had him travel.
Then out of the mist of the dying day came the memory of her noble face as
it had been in that happy hour when they had floated out to the lagoon, and
she had told him--her eyes alight with the _feu sacre_--her wishes for his
future.
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