内容简介：
Ten years after the American Civil War, Celeste Sinclair, now living in London with her second husband, receives a letter from her former mother-in-law, Helen Tremble, now living in Baltimore. Formerly Mrs Tremble was Mrs. James Dearborn the wife a Southern planter. She is writing from the Metropolitan Hotel in New York to report that she has rediscovered the Maestro. Big news. The Maestro, we gather, is a Gypsy violinist whom both Helen and Celeste knew before the war. The Maestro, it seems, had been important to both of them for reasons not immediately clear. Knowing, at last, how the Maestro may be contacted, Celeste writes to the him, catching him up on her own life during the war and after. She asks him he if he would consider writing to her son Aaron in order to tell the young man something about his real father, the late Carl Dearborn who had been the Maestro's best (perhaps only) friend among the Gajo or non-Gypsies. The Maestro, in his reply, explains that committing words to paper does not come naturally to the Rom (Gypsies), but he will do it for her sake and for that of her son who bears his name, Aaron. The Maestro then embarks upon a series of letters to his namesake in which he undertakes to tell the young man how his mother and father were brought together in the South's last antebellum years. At the same time he tells his own story, that of a Gypsy musician caught in a struggle to free his family held prisoner on trumped up charges by a sheriff who does not like their race. As non-white persons unfamiliar with Southern mores, the Gypsies tend to