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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.

Then Sybil said abruptly, “I’ve never rightly heard about Christian, mother. What was it made you think so much more of him than you thinks about the others?”

CHAPTER IV.

“My son’s first wife died after Christian was born,” said the old woman. “I’ve a sharp tongue, as you know, Sybil Stanley, and I’m doubtful if she was too happy while she lived; but when she was gone I knew she’d been a good ‘un, and I’ve always spoken of her accordingly.

“You’re too young to remember that year; it was a year of slack trade and hard times all over. Farmer-folk grudged you fourpence to mend the kettle, and as to broken victuals, there wasn’t as much went in at the front door to feed the family, as the servants would have thrown out at the back door another year to feed the pigs.

“When one gets old, my daughter, and sits over the fire at night and thinks, instead of tramping all day and sleeping heavy after it, as one does when one is young–things comes back; things comes back, I say, as they says ghosts does.

“And when we camps near trees with long branches, like them over there, that waves in the wind and confuses your eyes among the smoke, I sometimes think I sees her face, as it was before she died, with a pinched look across the nose. That is Christian’s mother, my son’s first wife; and it comes back to me that I believes she starved herself to let him have more; for he’s a man with a surly temper, like my own, is my son George. He grumbled worse than the children when he was hungry, and because she was so slow in getting strong enough to stand on her legs and carry the basket. You see he didn’t hold his tongue when things were bad to bear, as she could. Men doesn’t, my daughter.”

“I know, I know,” said the girl.