The version in Baring-Gould's Songs of the West has the wife as a gipsy woman, married against her inclinations to an earl (The Gipsy Countess, part 1.) In the second part, the wife runs away back to the gipsies, but when she rejects the earl and his wealth, and says she'll sleep in the wide open field,
" 'Nay, thou shalt not!'
Then he drew, I wot,
The sword that hung at his saddle bow.
And once he smote at her lily-white throat,
And there her red blood down did flow.

Then stained with blood, was the posie good,
THat was of the wildest flow'rs that blow.
She sank on her side, and so she died,
For she would away with the gipsies-o"