panied the
'Griengroes' to the East Anglian and Midland fairs.

Alongside the waggons was a single large brown tent that for
luxuriousness might have been the envy of all Gypsydom. On the
hawthorn bushes and the grass was spread, instead of the poor rags
that one often sees around a so-called Gypsy encampment, snowy
linen, newly washed. The ponies and horses were scattered about the
Dell feeding.

I soon distinguished Sinfi's commanding figure near that gorgeous
living-waggon of 'orange-yellow colour with red window-blinds' in
which she had persuaded me to invest my money at Chester. On the
foot-board sat two urchins of the Lovell family, 'making believe' to
drive imaginary horses, and yelling with all their might to Rhona
Boswell, whose laugh, musical as ever, showed that she enjoyed the
game as much as the children did. Sinfi was standing on a patch of
that peculiar kind of black ash which burnt grass makes, busy with a
fire, over which a tea-kettle was hanging from the usual iron
kettle-prop. Among the ashes left by a previous fire her bantam-cock
Pharaoh was busy pecking, scratching, and calling up imaginary hens
to feast upon his imaginary 'finds.' I entered the Dell, and before
Sinfi saw me I was close to her.

She was muttering to the refractory fire as though it were a live
thing, and asking it why it refused to burn beneath the kettle. A
startled look, partly of pleasure and partly of something like alarm,
came over her face as she perceived me. I drew her aside and told her
all that had happened in regard to Winifred's appearance as a beggar
in London. A strange expression that was new to me overspread her
features, and I thought I heard her whisper to herself, 'I will, I
will.'

'I knowed the cuss 'ud ha' to ha' its way in the blood, like the bite
of a sap' [snake], she murmured to herself. 'And yit the dukkeripen
on Snowdon said, clear and plain enough, as they'd surely marry at
last. What's become o' the stolen trushul, brother--the cross?' she
inquired aloud. 'That trushul will ha' to be given to the dead man
agin, an' it'll ha' to be given back by his chavo [child] as swore to
keep watch over it. But what's it all to me?' she said in a tone of
suppressed anger that startled me. 'I ain't a Gorgie,'

'But, Sinfi, the cross cannot be buried again. The reason I have not
replaced it in the tomb,--the reason I never will replace it
there,--is that the people along the coast know now of the existence
of