He shook his head.
“Thanks, no,” he answered briefly. “I know my fortune quite as well as I have any wish to.”
Tormarin’s curt refusal somewhat quenched the gaiety of the moment, and rather soberly they all four made their way down the slope to where, in a little sheltered hollow at the foot of the tor, the sunlight glinted on the corrugated iron roofing of a tiny two-roomed hut, built of wood.
Outside, sitting on an inverted pail and composedly puffing away at a clay pipe, they discovered a small, shrivelled old woman, sunning herself, like a cat, in the midday warmth.
She lifted her head as they approached, revealing an immensely old, delicately-featured face, which might have been carved out of yellow ivory. It was a network of wrinkles, colourless save for the piercing black eyes that sparkled beneath arched black brows, while the fine-cut nostrils and beautifully moulded mouth spoke unmistakably of race—of the old untainted blood which in some gipsy families has run clear, unmixed and undiluted, through countless generations.
There was an odd dignity about the shrunken, still upright figure as she rose from her seat—the freedom of one whose neck has never bowed to the yoke of established custom, whose kingdom is the sun and sea and earth and air as God gave them to Adam—and when the visitors had explained their errand, and she proceeded to answer them in the soft, slurred accents of the Devon dialect, the illiterate speech seemed to convey a strange sense of unfitness.
Claire and Nick were the first to dare the oracle. The old woman beckoned to them to follow her into the cottage, while Tormarin and Jean waited outside, and when they emerged once more, both were laughing, their faces eager and half excited like the faces of children promised some indefinite treat.
“She’s given you luck, then?” asked Jean, smiling in sympathy.
The gipsy interposed quickly.
“Tezn’t for me to give nor take away the luck. But I knaw that, back o’ they gert black clouds the young lady’s so mortal feared of, the zun’s shinin’ butivul. I tell ’ee, me dear”—nodding encouragingly to Claire, while her keen old eyes narrowed to mere pin-points of light—“you’ll zee it, yourself—and afore another year’s crep’ by. ’Ess, fay! You’ll knaw then as I tolled ’ee trew.”