“Oh, Dick, that is so uncharitable! How do you know they are impostors? How do you know but that they believe in their own art?”
“Do you believe in it?”
“No; but I want to have some fun out of the gipsy.”
“Very well; I consent provided it is meant in jest and not in earnest.”
“And here, Dick, let us put the gipsy’s powers to a test. You come in and sit down by me—then take little Lenny in your arms and play papa. Little Lenny being fair and flaxen-haired and blue-eyed, with all the Lyon features, is much more like me than like his own mother whom in truth he does not at all resemble, and he will easily be taken for ours. And the more easily because you and I look as if we had reached years of discretion, while Drusilla seems but a child. Let us play a trick on the gipsy, and ask her to foretell our boy’s future.”
“Ha! ha! ha! that will be good!”
Not one word of the conversation since Dick’s return did Drusilla hear—with her field-glass raised to her eyes, she was gazing at a particular point on the Grand Stand; for, even in that boundless crowd, her love had discovered her Alick—but, ah, discovered him among the desperate gamblers of the betting ring!
She was blind and deaf to everything else.
Meanwhile the gipsy had drawn something nearer to the General’s barouche. She was in fact standing beside the very next carriage, trying to wheedle the occupants to have their fortunes told; but they all—a circle of demure women—sternly warned the sibyl off and threatened her with the police, at which she laughed and shook her crisp, black curls.
“The police would not trouble a poor gipsy wife like herself,” she said.