as much afraid of me as I was of her. No eyes were ever like those, I
thought, except the eyes of a gipsy.

"What are you doing?" I stammered, in French, hardly expecting her to
understand and answer me; but she replied in an old, cracked voice that
sounded hollow and unreal in the cavern.

"I have been asleep," she said. "I am waiting for my sons. We are in Les
Baux on business. I thought, when I heard you, it was my boys coming to
fetch me. I can't go till they are here, because I have dropped my
rosary with a silver crucifix down below, and the way is too steep for
me. They must get it."

"Do they know you are here?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," she returned. "They will come at six. We shall perhaps have
our supper and sleep in this house to-night. Then we will go away in the
morning."

"It is only a little after five now," I told her. "You frightened me at
first."

She cackled a laugh. "I am nothing to be afraid of," she chuckled. "I am
very old. Besides, there is no harm in me. If you have the time, I could
tell your fortune."

"I'm afraid I haven't time," I said, though I was tempted. To have
one's fortune told in a cavern under a rock house where Romans had
lived, told by a real, live gipsy who looked as if she might be a lineal
descendant from Taven, and who was probably fresh from worshipping at
the tomb of Sarah! It would be an experience. No girl I knew, not even
Pam herself, who is always having adventures, could ever have had one as
good as this. If only I need not miss it!

"It would take no more than five minutes," she pleaded in her queer
French, which was barely understandable, and evidently not the tongue in
which she was most at home.

"Well, then," I said, hastily calculating that it was no more than ten
minutes since Lady Turnour and Sir Samuel left me, and that the water
for their punch couldn't possibly have begun to boil yet. "Well, then,
perhaps I might have five minutes' fortune, if it doesn't cost too much;
but I'm very poor--poorer than you, maybe."

"That cannot be, for then you would have less than nothing," said the
old woman, cackling again. "But it is your company I like to have, more
than your money. I have been waiting here a long time, and I am dull. No
fortune can be expected to come true, however, unless the teller's hand
be crossed with silver, otherwise I might give it you for nothing. But a
two-franc piece--"

"I think I have as much as that," I cut her short, as she pause