“Isn’t he a great sport?” Robert looked after his friend and ally admiringly, then he blurted out:—“Lady Red Bird, that sly cat of a nurse was trying to keep us apart. That’s why I wasn’t at the gate in the hedge yesterday. If I’d been strong enough I would have walked over here when I reached home and explained, but I was lots worse.”
The lad glanced anxiously into the flushed face of the girl. He feared she was hurt with him. “I say, Miss Nan, you’ll forgive my not being there. I wouldn’t be such a cad, if I could help it. You know that, don’t you?”
He was greatly relieved with the reply which was, “I wasn’t there myself, Robert Widdemere. Miss Dahlia had one of her headaches and was so sick I didn’t wan’t to leave her. I was sure you would understand.” Then, quickly changing the subject, she added. “This is a real comfortable chair. It’s where Miss Dahlia sits when she teaches me to read. Oh, I love reading,” she exclaimed, “and stories. I used to make them up out of my head to tell Little Tirol and the other children. Little wild foxes I called them.”
There was a sudden far away wistful expression in the girl’s dark eyes as she gazed out of the vine-hung door of the summer house, and the lad watching her, wondered that he had ever doubted that she was truly a gypsy. Surely, in that costume, there could be no question about it.
He said gently, “Lady Red Bird, I believe you sometimes wish you could go back to the old life.” She turned wide startled eyes toward him as she replied in a tense voice, “I’m going back when the black dragon comes again. I won’t stay here with her. I won’t be civilized for her. She doesn’t love me like Miss Dahlia does.”
“But doesn’t the wild gypsy life lure you?” the boy leaned forward interested. “I always imagine it as romantic and carefree.”
Again the girl looked at him startled, then replied in a low voice. “Would you think it was romantic to have to do everything that a cruel, black-hearted Anselo Spico and his demon mother said to do? Would you call it being carefree when you were thrashed till the blood came if you wouldn’t dance at the gorigo inns?
“I staid till little Tirol died. Anselo Spico had to beat me first, before he could get at that poor little cripple. I staid to take little Tirol’s beatings, but when he was dead, I ran away and came here.”
Robert Widdemere hardly knew what to say. “Lady Red Bird, I thought you told me you were proud of being a gypsy and that you loved the life.”
There was an instant change and springing up she flung her arms wide with almost a wistful cry—“I love living out in the open, with only the starry sky for a roof, and the branches of trees swaying, swaying over my head when I sleep. I love to ride on my pony Binnie away, away, away, to feel my hair blowing in the wind and to have nothing to do but live.”