"Who was 'right'?" my brother wanted to know.
"The gipsy. She told my fortune. That was why I didn't refuse to look for her rosary."
"I should have thought a child would have known better," he remarked, scornfully; and his tone hurt my sensitiveness the more because his voice had been so anxious and his words so kind when I was fainting. He had called me "child" and "little girl." I remembered well, and the words had been saying themselves over in my mind ever since. I rather thought that they betrayed a secret—that perhaps he had been getting to care for me a little. That idea pleased me, because he had been abrupt sometimes, and I hadn't known what to make of him. Every girl owes it to herself to understand a man thoroughly—at least, as much of his character and feelings as may concern her. Besides, it is not soothing to one's vanity to try—well, yes, I may as well confess that!—to try and please a man, yet to know you've failed after days of association so constant and intimate that hours are equal to the same number of months in an ordinary acquaintance. Now, after thinking I'd made the discovery that he really had found me attractive, it was a shock to be spoken to in this way.
"Oh, you are cross!" I exclaimed, still poking about in the hole under the stairway.
"I'm not cross," he said, "but if I were, you'd deserve it, because you know you've been foolish. And if you don't know, you ought to, so that you may be wiser next time. The idea of a sensible young woman chumming up in a lonely cave, with a dirty old gipsy certain to be a thief, if not worse, letting her tell fortunes, and then falling into a trap like this. I wouldn't have believed it of you!"
"I think you're perfectly horrid," said I. "I wish you had let the guide find me. He would have done it just as well, and been much more polite."
"Doubtless he would have been more polite, but he isn't as young, and might have had trouble in getting you out. There! that's my last match, and you mustn't waste any more time looking for treasure which you won't find."
"Which I have found!" I announced. "I've got something more—away at the back of the hole. Not that you deserve to see it!"
However, I held up my hand in its torn, bloodstained glove, with two silver pieces displayed on the palm.
"A child's hidey-hole, I suppose," he said without showing as much interest as the occasion warranted. "Otherwise there would be something more valuable. A young servant of the Grimaldis, perhaps; these coins are all of the same period—of no great value as antiques, I'm afraid."