He did not shrink, however, but kept his head and watched.
Once, as the musician flung his body round in a sweep of passion, Ingolby saw the black eyes flash to the weapons on the wall with a malign look which did not belong to the music alone, and he took a swift estimate of the situation.

Why the man should have any intentions against him, he could not guess, except that he might be one of the madmen who have a vendetta against the capitalist.

Or was he a tool of Felix Marchand?
It did not seem possible, and yet if the man was penniless and an anarchist maybe, there was the possibility.

Or--the blood rushed to his face--or it might be that the Gipsy's presence here, this display of devilish antipathy, as though it were all part of the music, was due, somehow, to Fleda Druse.
The music swelled to a swirling storm, crashed and flooded the feelings with a sense of shipwreck and chaos, through which a voice seemed to cry-the quiver and delicate shrillness of one isolated string--and then fell a sudden silence, as though the end of all things had come; and on the silence the trembling and attenuated note which had quivered on the lonely string, rising, rising, piercing the infinite distance and sinking into silence again.
In the pause which followed the Romany stood panting, his eyes fixed on Ingolby with an evil exaltation which made him seem taller and bigger than he was, but gave him, too, a look of debauchery like that on the face of a satyr.

Generations of unbridled emotion, of license of the fields and the covert showed in his unguarded features.
"What did the single cry--the motif--express ?" Ingolby asked coolly.