“Who?”
“Who? who but the Faas of her ain tribe, and bonnily they decked her, in a muslin gown o’ gowden-spangled white, and they put roses and ferns in her dark hair, and a croon upon her head, and it’s wondrous beautiful she looked. Ay, ye may stare, but Zella is queen o’ the gipsies, and no doubt ye’ll see her ere lang.”
He turned sharp round towards Douglas as he spoke.
“I dinna doubt, sir,” he said, “but that the gipsy queen will come to your weddin’.”
Now Douglas’s face was, from exposure to sun and weather, of a sort of dignified brick-dust hue. One would have thought it impossible for such a face to blush, but deeper in colour it really got as he laughingly replied to the garrulous old Peter.
“My wedding, Peter! Why, my dear old friend, you’ve been dreaming.”
“Och, mon!” said Peter, with a sly wink. “I can see as far through a millstone as the miller himself. But I’m off, there’s the bell. It’s that auld limmer of a cook, she keeps ring, ring, ringing for me a’ day lang, with ‘Peter, do this’ and ‘Peter, do that.’ Sorrow tak’ her! Ring, ring, ring; there it goes again. Comin’, comin,’ comin’.”
“Strange old man!” said Douglas.
“That he is,” said Leonard, “but yet how leal and true he has been to our family.”
A day or two after this the old family carriage was had out—and a stately and ancient-looking affair it was, hung on monster leather straps, which permitted it to swing about like a hammock, while inside it was as snug and soft as a feather bed—the carriage was got out, and accompanied by a phaeton, in which rode the younger folks, a visit was made to the gipsy camp in a far-off forest.