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 the jewel, and know also of my father’s wishes.  If it was unsafe in the tomb when only Winnie’s father knew of it, it would be a thousandfold more unsafe now.’

‘P’raps that’s all the better for her an’ you:  the new thief takes the cuss.’

‘This is all folly,’ I replied, with the anger of one struggling against an unwelcome half-belief that refuses to be dismissed.  ’It is all moonshine-madness.  I’ll never do it,—­not at least while I retain my reason.  It was no doubt partly for safety as well as for the other reason that my father wished the cross to be placed in the tomb.  It will be far safer now in a cabinet than anywhere else.’