Raymond, realizing that for some reason Mrs. Annandale sought to place him at a disadvantage, was on the point of gasping out a denial, but the gaucherie of contradicting a lady, and she the sister of his host, deterred him.
Though the young girl was convent-bred with great seclusion and care, she had emerged into an atmosphere of such sophistication that she was able to seem to have apprehended naught amiss. She bent her eyes with quiet attention on her aunt’s face when Mrs. Annandale said abruptly:—
“Tell George Mervyn how oddly those gypsies were dressed—gypsies, or Hindoos, or whatever they were—that camped down on the edge of the copse close to his grandfather’s park gates last fall, and told your fortune!”
“Was it on our side of the ha-ha, or your side?” asked Mervyn, eagerly. For as Raymond understood the property of the two families adjoined, large and manorial possessions on the part of the Mervyns, and with their neighbors a very modest holding—a good old house but with little land.
“Oh, to think of the copse!” cried Mervyn with a gush of homesick feeling,—“to think of the beck! I could almost die to be a boy again for one hour, bird-nesting there once more!”
“Even if I made you put the eggs back?” Arabella smiled.
“Though they would never hatch after being touched,” he corroborated.
“But tell the story, Arabella. Tell what the gypsy said,” urged Mrs. Annandale, significantly.
The young lady still stood, her hand resting on her father’s chair. She looked down into the fire with inscrutable hazel eyes. Her face seemed to glow and pale, as the flames flared and fell and sent pulsations of shoaling light along the glistening waves of her pink tabby gown.
“I don’t care what the gypsy said,” she returned.