ou'll
come home. I'm sure I have done very wrong. You know I'm always hard up,
but I declare I'd give a hundred pounds if you'd come home with me at
once. I don't believe there's a gipsy within--"

"Good-day, my pretty young gentleman. Let the poor gipsy girl tell you
your fortune."

He turned round and saw Sybil standing at his elbow, her eyes flashing
and her white teeth gleaming in a broad smile. He stood speechless in
sudden surprise; but the clergywoman, who was not surprised, came
forward with her white hands stretched so expressively towards Sybil's
brown ones, that the gipsy girl all but took them in her own.

"Please kindly tell me--do you know anything of a young gipsy, named
Christian?"

The clergywoman spoke with such vehemence that Sybil answered directly,
"I know his grandmother"--and then suddenly stopped herself.

But as she spoke, she had turned her head with an expressive gesture in
the direction of the encampment, and without waiting for more, the
clergywoman ran down the path, calling on her cousin to follow her.

CHAPTER VII.

My ancestor's artifice was very successful when the race was run on two
sides of a hedge, backwards and forwards; but if a louis d'or and a
bottle of brandy had depended on my reaching the tinker-mother before
the clergywoman, I should have lost the wager. We hurried after her,
however, as fast as we were able, keeping well under the brushwood.

When we could see our neighbours again, the tinker-mother was standing
up, and speaking hurriedly, with a wild look in her eyes.

"Let me be, Sybil Stanley, and let me speak. I says again, what has fine
folk to do with coming and worriting us in our wood? If I did sell him,
I sold him fair--and if I got him back, I bought him back fair. Aye my
delicate gentlewoman, you may look at me, but I did!

"Five years, five years of wind and weather, and hard days and lonely
nights:--

"Five years of food your men would chuck to the pigs, and of clothes
your maids would think scorn to scour in:--

"Five years--but I scraped it together, and _then_ they baulked me. You
shuts the door in the poor tinker-woman's face; you gives the words of
warning to the police.

"Five more years--it was five more, wasn't it, my daughter?--Sometimes I
fancies I makes a mistake and overcounts. But, _he'll_ know. Christian,
my dear! Christian, I say!"

"Sit down, Mother, sit down," said the gipsy girl; and the old woman sat
down, but she we