He had told the truth when he said that no woman had ever appealed to him as she did; that she had blotted out all other women from the book of his adventurous and dissolute life; and he had dreamed a dream of conquest of her when Fortune should hand out to him the key of the situation.

Did not the beautiful Russian countess on the Volga flee from her liege lord and share his 'tan'?
When he played his fiddle to the Austrian princess, did she not give him a key to the garden where she walked of an evening?
And this was a Romany lass, daughter of his Chieftain, as he was son of a great Romany chief; and what marvel could there be that she who had been made his child wife, should be conquered as others had been! "'Mi Duvel', but I see!" he repeated in a husky fierceness.

"I am your husband, but you would have killed me if I had taken a kiss from your lips, sealed to me by all our tribes and by your father and mine." "My lips are my own, my life is my own, and when I marry, I shall marry a man of my own choosing, and he will not be a Romany," she replied with a look of resolution which her beating heart belied.

"I'm not a pedlar's basket." "'Kek! Kek'! That's plain," he retorted.

"But the 'wolf' is no lamb either! I said I would not go till your father set me free, since you had no right to do so, but a wife should save her husband, and her husband should set himself free for his wife's sake"-- his voice rose in fierce irony--"and so I will now go free.