“No.”
“Do you like being with the others?”
“They were very kind,” said Ralph.
“Did you have a picnic breakfast with them?”
“Oh, no.”
“If I were your school-mother,” said Harriet, after a pause, “we would have one every day, and—and—no lessons; and you might play with matches, and you might have a pop-gun, and there’s something else we would do.”
“Oh, what is it?”
“We’d go and see the gipsies.”
“But I am frightened of gipsies,” said Ralph. As he spoke he pressed a little nearer to Harriet. “Are there gipsies about?”
“There are some gipsies living two fields off—you look almost like a gipsy boy yourself, you are so dark. There are a lot of little brown babies rolling about on the grass, and big brown men, and big brown women, and there are dogs, and a donkey, and an old horse; but the most wonderful thing of all is the house on wheels.”