'I wonder who on earth Wallace is?' he thought.
He did not have long to wonder.
'I'm going to signal for Wallace,' said Lotty.
She stood on the very edge of a rocky precipice that went sheer down to the green sea-links below, full three hundred feet and over. Close by was the mark of a former fire.
'I always signal from here,' she said, 'and Wallace always comes. He is never happy when I am far away, and keeps watching for me.'
It didn't take the little gipsy lass long to scrape dry grass and twigs together. A leathern pouch hung from her girdle, and from this she produced a flint and steel, with some touch-paper, and in less than half a minute the signal-fire was alit.
A most romantic figure the girl presented as she stood there on the cliff, looking straight out seawards, one hand above her brow to screen her eyes from the red glare of the flames, her sweet, sad face a picture, with the night wind blowing back her wealth of soft fair hair and the silken frock from off her shapely limbs.
It was not the beauty but the sadness of Lotty's face that appealed to Antony most.
Why sad? That was the mystifying question.
He had taken a strange and indefinable interest in this twelve-year-old gipsy child. He had come down here to take away the caravan for which he was to pay a solid five hundred guineas, and had made up his mind to stay only a few days; but now on the cliff-top here he suddenly resolved that, if he could be amused, he would remain at the camp for as many weeks. He had no intention of travelling in the caravan during the wintry months. He would take the great carriage south by rail, and, starting from Brighton, do a record journey right away through England and Scotland from sea to sea, starting when the first green buds were on the trees and the larks carolling over the rolling downs of Sussex. So now he lay on the grass, waiting, and wondering who Wallace would be.