Yet gipsies are more superstitious than any one else.  Hanging to her neck by a skein of plaited horse-hair was the polished shell of a minute turtle—­smaller than a dollar piece.

“Give me that,” I said, “for luck,” and she jumped at the idea.

“Yes, yes—­that is to bring you luck—­ver’ much luck!”

She snatched it off and hung it around my neck, pushing the turtle-shell down under my collar out of sight.

“That is love-token!” she whispered.  “Now she love you immediate’!  Now you ‘ave ver’ much luck!”

The last part of her prophecy was true.  The luck seemed to change.  That instant the key was given me to escape without making her my relentless enemy, a voice that I would know among a million began shouting for me petulantly from somewhere half a dozen roofs away.

“What in hell’s keeping you, man?  Here’s Monty getting up a tourist party to his damned ancestral nest and you’re delaying the whole shebang!  Good lord alive!  Have you fallen in love with a woman, or taken the belly-ache, or fallen down a well, or gone to sleep again, or all of them, or what?”

“Coming, Fred!” I shouted.  “Coming!”

“You’d better!”

He began playing cat-calls on his concertina—­imitation bugle-calls, and fragments of serenades.  For a second Maga looked reckless—­then suspicious—­then, as it began to dawn on her from studying my face that I, too, was afraid of Fred, relieved.

“Does he know anything?” I asked her.

“He?  That Fred?  No!  No, no, no!  An’ you no tell ’im.  You ’ear me?  You no tell ’im!  You go now—­go to ’im, or else ’e is get suspicious—­understan’?  My men—­they go an’ get that woman.  When they finish getting that woman, then I send for you an’ you come quick—­understan’?”

I nodded.

“Listen!  If you tell your frien’s—­if you tell that Frrred, or those others—­then I not only keel you, but my men put out your eyes first an’ then pull off your toes an’ fingers—­understan’?”

I shrugged my shoulders, suggesting an attempt to seem at ease.

“Besides—­I warn you!  You tell Kagig anything against me an’ Kagig is at once your enemy!”

I nodded, and tried to look afraid.  Perhaps the speculation that the last boast started in my mind helped give me a look that convinced her.

Fred began calling again.

“You go!” she ordered imperiously, with a last effort to impress me with her mental predominance.  “Go quickly!”

I made motions of hand and face as nearly suggestive of underhanded cunning as I could compass, and climbed out through the window without further invitation.  Seeing me emerge, Fred beckoned from fifty yards away and turned his back.  Morning was just beginning to descend into the valley, suddenly bright from having finished all the dawn delays among the crags higher up; but there were deep shadows here and especially where one roof overhung another.