“Only when you girls go off cruising, I ain’t,” observed Sammy, his face clouding with remembrance. “Then I ain’t even a step-child.”
But he produced the quarter and offered it to Tess. She counted it with the money already in her hand.
“But—but that makes only forty-five cents,” she said.
The two Gypsy women spoke hissingly to each other in a tongue that the children did not, of course, understand. Then the older woman thrust the basket out again.
“Take!” she said. “Take for forty-fi’ cents, eh? The little ladies can have.”
“Go ahead,” Sammy said as Tess hesitated. “That’s all the old basket is worth. I can get one bigger than that at the chain store for seven cents.”
“Oh, Sammy, it isn’t as bee-you-tiful as this!” gasped Dot.
“Well, it’s a basket just the same.”
Tess put the silver and pennies in the old woman’s clawlike hand and the longed-for basket came into her possession.
“It is a good-fortune basket, pretty little ladies,” repeated the old Gypsy, grinning at them toothlessly. “You are honest little ladies, I can see. You would never cheat the old Gypsy, would you? This is all the money you have to pay for the beautiful basket? Forty-fi’ cents?”