“You’re going to cross water, meet a dark stranger, have a light complexioned enemy and all that, aren’t you?” demanded Jack, banteringly.
In turn the other girls went in and came out, making merry over what they heard in secret.
“Now for us!” exclaimed Blake, when Marie, the last of the quartette, had been told of the past, present and future.
“I tell no more!” announced the Gypsy, coming from the room. “I am tired. If they like the gentlemen may come to our camp to-morrow. I thank you, ladies, but it is late, and I must be getting back.”
“You may go out the front way,” suggested Mabel gently, for, somehow, they had all taken a liking to the pretty Gypsy stranger.
“Good-night,” she said, and standing on the front steps they all watched the Gypsy girl hurry down the street.
“Not half bad looking!” commented Jack. “Ahem!”
“She was rather a gentle little creature,” commented his sister.
“I wonder how they can stand such a life—in wagons traveling all over?” questioned Mabel.
“Well, she made a pretty good thing out of you girls,” declared Phil. “Now tell us what she said.”
“Never!” came firmly from Natalie, and the others echoed her words.
As they went back into the library they saw Mrs. Anderson standing at the door. Her face wore rather a worried look.
“What is it, momsey?” asked Phil. “Did you want your fortune told?”
“I just happened to think,” she answered, “that I had left my diamond ring on the table in the little room off the library. I came down to get it, but it isn’t there. Have you seen it, Mabel?”
“And it was in that room that the Gypsy girl told our fortunes.”
“With the light turned low,” added Natalie.
Phil brushed past his sister, and, turning up the gas, looked carefully on the table in the little room.
“No ring here, mother,” he announced. “Are you sure you left it here?”
“Yes, I was putting away some seldom-used books, and I took it off so I would not knock it against the shelves. Perhaps it is on the floor.”
Then ensued a hurried search. It was unavailing. The girls and boys looked at one another.
“And so is that Gypsy girl!” echoed Phil. “I’ll wager she has it! That’s why she didn’t want to stop to tell us fellows our fortunes. She wanted to get away! She had every chance in the world to slip that ring in her pocket when she was in the half-darkness here, telling fortunes. Fellows, come on to that Gypsy camp, and we’ll make her give it up!”