“It is going a great deal too far, grandpa. Come now, don’t let her be putting courtship and matrimony into your head. I won’t have any young grandmamma set up at Old Lyon Hall to lord it over me,” laughed Anna.
“Nonsense, my girl! The only way in which I may ever make any lady’s heart ache, will be by getting the gout, and growing cross over it, and growling at you and Drusilla from morning until night,” said the General.
At that moment a policeman stepped up and put his hand on the gipsy’s shoulder, saying:
“Come, Gentilly, I have had my eye on you this half hour. Move on.”
“Ah, bless the dear blue eyes of him,” coaxed the fortune-teller, turning around and patting the man’s cheeks, “he’ll never make the poor old gipsy wife move on, now that she has come up to her luck—such luck, my darling. Only see what the grand, noble young gentleman has given the poor gipsy. When the race is over, come up to my tent, pet, and have a pot of porter and a plate of biled beef and carrots with his old mother,” she added, patting him on the cheek again and turning from him.
“That’s the way, you see, sir—that’s always the way with Gentilly,” said the policeman, apologetically, to the old gentleman.
“You know her?” inquired Dick.
“Know Gentilly? Bless you, sir, everybody on the race-course knows Gentilly and her sister, Patience.”
“And you know no harm of her, I dare say, although you are a police officer.”
“Well, sir, beyond——”