“Let me tell it for you,” said the old dame, looking eagerly up.
“I did not come to have my fortune told; I only came as an attendant to these foolish young ladies,” Scott said, with a smile.
“Oh, yes,” said Nellie Blake, a pretty little blonde, shaking back her shining curls, “he calls us silly, when he is just dying to know his fortune, only he is afraid it will be a cloudy one. I dare him to have it told.”
Scott, smiling, said it would not do to have the young ladies think him a coward, so turning around gave the old gypsy his hand.
Zula, though tired and weak, meantime, watched through the crevice of the tent the faces of her kind deliverers. How bright and happy June looked, and 26 how wonderfully the pretty lavender suit she wore became her pink and white complexion, and Zula, contrasting her own dusky face with that of June, thought surely the angels in Heaven could not be sweeter or more holy than she.
Poor Zula! There she had been for nearly two days, lame and tired, and so weak, waiting like a prisoner until her sentence should expire, waiting for time to move and bring her a respite. She saw the carriage move away, drawn by two dapple-gray ponies; she heard its occupants laughing merrily. She sat wondering if her time had not nearly expired, for the sun was going down and the whippoorwill beginning his mournful song, and she wondered as she thought of the weird gypsy tales she had been told, if “poor will” had been whipped for nothing. She peeped out to gaze at the group around as Meg entered.
“If you are cured of your ugliness, now, you may come out and get some soup; there’s some onions and other stuff, too, that Crisp has brought in; no thanks to you though.”
As Meg said this she untied the cords, and Zula arose. She trembled in every limb, for the fast of two days had made her very weak, and her sunken eyes looked larger and blacker than ever. She followed Meg out of the tent and partaking of the soup she wandered away from the rest and sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree. Zula had but one thought, and that was revenge. She was puzzling her poor little tired brain as to how she should manage to injure Crisp. She looked up, and the object of her thoughts stood before her, and, casting 27 a look of fiendish exultation toward her, he said: “I guess you don’t hate me any more.”
Zula made no reply.
“Do you hate me, yet?” he asked again.