“The gipsy,” she murmured, “the tall, dark gipsy has taken little Nan!”
Her face was very white, her eyes shone, her lips expressed a firm and almost obstinate determination. With all her usual impulsiveness, she decided on a course of action—she snatched up a piece of paper and scribbled a hasty line:
“Dear Mother-friend,—However badly you think of Annie, Annie loves you with all her heart. Forgive me, I must go myself to look for little Nan. That tall, dark woman is a gipsy—I have seen her before; her name is Mother Rachel. Tell Hetty I won’t return until I bring her little sister back.—Your repentant and sorrowful Annie.”
Annie twisted up the note, directed it to Mrs Willis, and left it on her dressing-table.
Then, with a wonderful amount of forethought for her, she emptied the contents of a little purse into a tiny gingham bag, which she fastened inside the front of her dress. She put on her shady hat, and threw a shawl across her arm, and then, slipping softly downstairs, she went out through the deserted kitchens, down the back avenue, and past the laurel-bush, until she came to the stile which led into the wood—she was going straight to the gipsies’ encampment.
Annie, with some of the gipsy’s characteristics in her own blood, had always taken an extraordinary interest in these queer wandering people. Gipsies had a fascination for her, she loved stories about them; if a gipsy encampment was near, she always begged the teachers to walk in that direction. Annie had a very vivid imagination, and in the days when she reigned as favourite in the school she used to make up stories for the express benefit of her companions. These stories, as a rule, always turned upon the gipsies. Many and many a time had the girls of Lavender House almost gasped with horror as Annie described the queer ways of these people. For her, personally, their wildness and their freedom had a certain fascination, and she was heard in her gayest moments to remark that she would rather like to be stolen and adopted by a gipsy tribe.
Whenever Annie had an opportunity she chatted with the gipsy wives, and allowed them to tell her fortune, and listened eagerly to their narratives. When a little child she had once for several months been under the care of a nurse who was a reclaimed gipsy, and this girl had given her all kinds of information about them. Annie often felt that she quite loved these wild people, and Mother Rachel was the first gipsy she cordially shrank from and disliked.
When the little girl started now on her wild-goose chase after Nan she was by no means devoid of a plan of action. The knowledge she had taken so many years to acquire came to her aid, and she determined to use it for Nan’s benefit. She knew that the gipsies, with all their wandering and erratic habits, had a certain attachment, if not for homes, at least for sites; she knew that as a rule they encamped over and over again in the same place; she knew that their wanderings were conducted with method, and their apparently lawless lives governed by strict self-made rules.
Annie made straight now for the encampment, which stood in a little dell at the other side of the fairies’ field. Here for weeks past the gipsies’ tents had been seen; here the gipsy children had played, and the men and women smoked and lain about in the sun.