“Ray, you’ve enough imagination for a novelist!” murmured Ardiune admiringly.
Having settled their plan of campaign, the next step was to carry out details. The question of costume loomed largest.
“We must look real gipsies, not stage ones,” decreed Raymonde. “The thing’s got to be done properly, if it’s done at all.”
They ransacked the property box used for school theatricals, and having selected some likely garments, set to work on an ideal of realism. Two skirts were carefully torn on nails, artistically stained with rust and mud, and rubbed on the barn floor to give them an extra tone. Some cotton bodices were similarly treated. Shoes were a knotty problem, for gipsies do not generally affect trim footgear, yet nobody at the Grange possessed worn-out or dilapidated boots. In the end Raymonde carefully unpicked the stitches in her oldest pairs to give them the requisite burst appearance, and with the aid of a file rubbed the respectability from them. A dip in the mud of the moat completed the transformation. Some cheap beads and coloured handkerchiefs, and a faint wash of Vandyke brown over face and hands, gave the finishing touches.
In the interval between preparation and supper, when several members of the Sixth Form were pursuing carpentry and other industrial occupations in the barn, Aveline Kerby entered to borrow a screw-driver. She conversed casually on the topics of wood-carving, photography, pressed flowers, 84 and kindred hobbies; then, just as she was leaving, turned back and remarked, apparently as an afterthought:
“Oh, by the by, do you know there are two gipsies in the cow-house? They’re from the caravan by the river. They came in through the back gate, begging, and Morvyth happened to meet them. They offered to tell her fortune, so she took them into the cow-house, so that Gibbie shouldn’t see them. She says they’re marvellous. They described her mother exactly, and her brother at the front. Isn’t it wonderful now they can do it?”
“Are they there still?” asked Veronica, swallowing the bait.
“I believe so. At least they were, five minutes ago. Elsie Moseley and Cynthia Greene had gone to see them. I’d go myself, but I’ve spent all my allowance, and of course one has to cross their palms with the orthodox piece of silver, I suppose. It’s hard luck to be stony-broke. Ta-ta! Thanks for the screw-driver!”
Aveline beat a judicious retreat, and left her words to work. As she had expected, the news of the arrival of the occultists was received with interest.
“It’s an extraordinary thing that gipsies are so often gifted with psychic powers,” commented Meta.