The gipsy girl knelt quietly by the fire, and stirred up the embers.

“What is the matter, mother?” she said.  “We’ve only just come, and when I heard that Tinker George and his mother were in the wood, I started to find you.  ‘You makes too free with the tinkers,’ says my brother’s wife.  ‘I goes to see my mother,’ says I, ’who nursed me through a sickness, my real mother being dead, and my own people wanting to bury me through my not being able to speak or move, and their wanting to get to the Bartelmy Fair.’  I never forget, mother; have you forgotten me, that you drives me away for bidding you good-day?”

“Good days are over for me,” moaned the old woman.  “Begone, I say!  Don’t let me see or hear any that belongs to Black Basil, or it may be the worse for them.”

("The tinker-mother whines very nastily,” said Mrs. Hedgehog.  “If I were the young woman, I should bite her.”

“Hush!” I answered, “she is speaking.”)

“Basil is in prison,” said the gipsy girl hoarsely.

The old woman’s eyes shone in their sockets, as she looked up at Sybil for a minute, as if to read the gipsy’s sentence on her face; and then she chuckled,

“So they’ve taken the Terror of the Roads?”

Sybil’s eyes had not moved from the fire, before which she was now standing with clasped hands.

“The Terror of the Roads?” she said.  “Yes, they call him that,—­but I could turn him round my finger, mother.”  Her voice had dropped, and she smoothed one of her black curls absently round her finger as she spoke.

“You couldn’t keep him out of prison,” taunted the old woman.

“I couldn’t keep him out of mischief,” said the girl, sadly; and then, with a sudden flash of anger, she clasped her hands above her head and cried, “A black curse on Jemmy and his gang!”

“A black curse on them as lets the innocent go to prison in their stead.  They comes there themselves in the end, and long may it hold them!” was the reply.

Sybil moved swiftly to the old woman’s side.

“I heard you was in trouble, mother, about Christian; but you don’t think—­”

“Think!” screamed the old woman, shaking her fists, whilst the girl interrupted her—­

“Hush, mother, hush! tell me now, tell me all, but not so loud,” and kneeling with her back to us, she said something more in a low voice, to which the old woman replied in a whine so much moderated, that though Mrs. Hedgehog and I strained our ears, and crept as near the group as we dared, we could not catch a word.

Only, after a while Sybil rose up and walked back slowly to the fire, twisting the long lock of her hair as before, and saying—­“I turns him round my finger, mother, as far as that goes—­”

“So you thinks,” said the old crone.  “But he never will—­even if you would, Sybil Stanley!  Oh Christian, my child, my child!”

The gipsy girl stood still, like a young poplar-tree in the dead calm before thunder; and there fell a silence, in which I dared not have moved myself, or allowed Mrs. Hedgehog to move, three steps through the softest grass, for fear of being heard.