Weeks passed in this way.  My aunt’s ill-health became rather serious:  my mother too was still very unwell.  I afterwards learnt that her illness was really the result of the dire conflict in her breast between the old passion of pride and the new invader remorse.  There were, no doubt, many discussions between them concerning me.  I could see plainly enough they both thought my mind was becoming unhinged.

One night, as I lay thinking over the insoluble mystery of Winifred’s disappearance, I was struck by a sudden thought that caused me to leap from my bed.  What could have led the official in Scotland Yard to connect Winifred with Gypsies?  I had simply told him of her disappearance on Snowdon, and her reappearance afterwards near the theatre.  Not one word had I said to him about her early relations with Gypsies.  I was impatient for the daylight, in order that I might go to Scotland Yard again.  When I did so and saw the official, I asked him without preamble what had caused him to connect the missing girl I was seeking with the Gypsies.

‘The little fancy baskets she was selling,’ said he.  ’They are often made by Gypsies.’

‘Of course they are,’ I said, hurrying away.  ’Why did I not think of this?’

In fact I had, during our wanderings over England and Wales, often seen Sinfi’s sister Videy and Rhona Boswell weaving such baskets.  Winifred, after all, might be among the Gypsies, and the crafty Videy Lovell might have some mysterious connection with her; for she detested me as much as she loved the gold ‘balansers’ she could wheedle out of me.  Moreover, there were in England the Hungarian Gypsies, with their notions about demented girls, and the Lovells, owing to Sinfi’s musical proclivities, were just now much connected with a Hungarian troupe.

VII

SINFI’S DUKKERIPEN

I

The Gypsies I had never seen since leaving them in Wales, and I knew that by this time they were either making their circuit of the English fairs or located in a certain romantic spot called Gypsy Dell, near Rington Manor, the property of my kinsman Percy Aylwin, whither they often went after the earlier fairs were over.

The next evening I went to the Great Eastern Railway station, and taking the train to Rington I walked to Gypsy Dell, where I found the Lovells and Boswells.

Familiar as I was with, the better class of Welsh Gypsies, the camp here was the best display of Romany well-being I had ever seen.  It would, indeed, have surprised those who associate all Gypsy life with the squalor which in England, and especially near London, marks the life of the mongrel wanderers who are so often called Gypsies.  In a lovely dingle, skirted by a winding, willow-bordered river, and dotted here and there with clumps of hawthorn, were ranged the ‘living-waggons’ of those trading Romanies who had accompanied the ‘Griengroes’ to the East Anglian and Midland fairs.