“No, no,” said Bobby, shaking her head vigorously.
The other woman recognized her and touched the arm of her companion warningly.
“Surely the little lady will not be unkind to the poor Romany,” she whined. “She does not forget what Queen Grace told her?”
“I want to forget it,” declared Bobby, with flushed face. “I have nothing for you. Go away—do!”
“Ah-ha, little lady!” chuckled the woman, with a leer. “You are mistress here now—and you can send us away. But remember! Your father will bring home another mistress before mid-summer.”
The two women laughed harshly, and turned away, going slowly out of the yard. Bobby remained upon the porch until she had winked back the tears—and bitter tears they were, indeed—and so went slowly in to breakfast.
“Those horrid ’Gyptians,” Mrs. Ballister was saying. “I caught them out there trying to tell Sally’s fortune. They’d make her believe she was going to fall heir to a fortune, or get a husband, or something, and then we’d lose the best kitchen girl we ever had.”
But Bobby felt too serious to smile at the old lady’s sputtering. Despite what Laura Belding said, there must be something in the fortunes the Gypsy queen told! How did she know so much about her? Bobby asked herself.
She knew that Bobby had no mother and that she was sure to get into trouble with her teachers. And now the prophecy she had made that her father would bring home a new wife before mid-summer rankled in Bobby Hargrew’s mind like a barbed arrow.
For Bobby loved her father very dearly, and had been for years his confidante. It had long been agreed between them that she was going to be his partner in the grocery business, just as though she had been born a boy. And as soon as the little girls were big enough they were to go away to boarding school, Mrs. Ballister should be relieved of the responsibility of the house, and Bobby was going to be the real mistress of the Hargrew home.