. The girls took it in turns,
and Oswald wonders why their hairs did not go gray. Though of course it
was much better fun for them than for us, because we had just to be
mutes when we weren't playing on the combs.

The people we told fortunes to at first laughed rather, and said we were
too young to know anything. But Oswald said in a hollow voice that we
were as old as the Pyramids, and after that Alice took the tucks out of
Dicky's red coat and put it on and turbaned herself, and looked much
older.

The stable clock had chimed the quarter to five some little time, when
an elderly gentleman with whiskers, who afterwards proved to be Sir
Willoughby, burst into the tent.

"Where's Miss Blockson?" he said, and we answered truthfully that we did
not know.

"How long have you been here?" he furiously asked.

"Ever since two," said Alice wearily.

He said a word that I should have thought a baronet would have been
above using.

"Who brought you here?"

We described the gentleman who had done this, and again the baronet said
things we should never be allowed to say. "That confounded Carew!" he
added, with more words.

"Is anything wrong?" asked Dora--"can we do anything? We'll stay on
longer if you like--if you can't find the lady who was doing Esmeralda
before we came."

"I'm not very likely to find her," he said ferociously. "Stay longer
indeed! Get away out of my sight before I have you locked up for
vagrants and vagabonds."

He left the scene in bounding and mad fury. We thought it best to do as
he said, and went round the back way to the stables so as to avoid
exciting his ungoverned rage by meeting him again. We found our cart and
went home. We had got two quid and something to talk about.

But none of us--not even Oswald the discerning--understood exactly what
we had been mixed up in, till the pink satin box with three large
bottles of A1 scent in it, and postmarks of foreign lands, came to Dora.
And there was a letter. It said--

"My dear Gipsies,--I beg to return the Eau de Cologne you so kindly lent
me. The lady did use a little of it, but I found that foreign travel was
what she really wanted to make her quite happy. So we caught the 4.15
to town, and now we are married, and intend to live to a green old age,
&c., as you foretold. But for your help my fortune couldn't have come
true, because my wife's father, Sir Willoughby, thought I was not rich
enough to marry. But you see I was. And my wife an