“I’ll show you.  It will be easy.”

“Let’s look first for the wicked old creature’s rosary.  If it isn’t here, it’s certain she’s a fraud.”

“I should think it’s certain without looking.  I’d like to put the old serpent in prison.”

“I wouldn’t care to trouble, now I’m safe.  And anyway, how could we prove she meant her sons to rob me, since they hadn’t begun the act, and so couldn’t be caught in it?”

“She didn’t know you had a man to look after you.  When the guide and I came this way, searching, we met a gipsy woman with two awful brutes, and asked if they’d seen a young lady in a gray coat.  They were all three on their way here, as you thought; but when they saw us close to this house, of course, they dared not carry out their plan, and the old woman made the best of a bad business.  No doubt they’re as far off by this time as they could get.  It might be difficult to prove anything, but I’d like to try.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said.  “But let’s look for that rosary.  Have you any matches?”

“Plenty.”  He took out a match-case, and held a wax vesta for me to peer about in the neighbourhood of the broken stairway.

“Here’s something glittering!” I exclaimed, just as I had been about to give up the search in vain.  “She said there was a silver crucifix.”

I slipped my fingers into a crack where the rock had been split in breaking off the lower steps.  A small, bright thing was there, almost buried in debris, but I could not get my fingers in deep enough to dislodge it.  Impatiently I pulled out a hat-pin, and worked until I had unearthed—­not the rosary, but a silver coin.

“Somebody else has been down here, dropping money,” I said, handing the piece up for Mr. Dane to examine.

“Then it was a long time ago,” he replied, “for the coin has the head of Louis XIII. on it.”

“Oh, then she was right!” I cried.  “I can find lost treasure.  I’m going to look for more.  I believe that piece must have fallen out of a hole I’ve found here, which goes back ever so far into the rock.  I can get my arm in nearly to the elbow.”

“Who was ’right’?” my brother wanted to know.

“The gipsy.  She told my fortune.  That was why I didn’t refuse to look for her rosary.”

“I should have thought a child would have known better,” he remarked, scornfully; and his tone hurt my sensitiveness the more because his voice had been so anxious and his words so kind when I was fainting.  He had called me “child” and “little girl.”  I remembered well, and the words had been saying themselves over in my mind ever since.  I rather thought that they betrayed a secret—­that perhaps he had been getting to care for me a little.  That idea pleased me, because he had been abrupt sometimes, and I hadn’t known what to make of him.  Every girl owes it to herself to understand a man thoroughly—­at least, as much of his character