“And then you will go on your way,” she said.
“And then I shall go on my way,” cried the gipsy. “And you will wait here till your husband comes, whom you love more than anything else on this earth.”
Then the potter’s wife bent her head and tasted the wine out of the cup, and wished the gipsy happiness. And when she had done so he laughed again, long and low, till her heart sank with fear, and he picked up the cup and put it into his bundle, and went his way. Then the potter’s wife sat down by the cradle, and almost cried, she knew not why, and the whole room seemed cold, and when she looked out at the sunshine it looked dark, and she bent over the baby in the cradle with her tears falling.
“Alack!” she cried, “why doesn’t my husband come home? Where is he gone? How cruel it is to leave me all alone here, so that any rough man may come into the house. In truth I don’t think he can love me much, since all he thinks of is to go away and leave me; and as for me, surely I could have had many a better husband, and one who should have loved me more. How foolish I was to marry him.”
Thus she sat and lamented all day, and in the evening, when the potter drove up to his door and cried out “Wife, wife,” she wouldn’t go out to receive him. And when he came in to their little sitting-room, he found her with tears in her eyes, sitting lamenting and complaining. When he went up to her to take her in his arms and kiss her, she turned away from him and would not let him touch her, and the potter, who had never seen his wife cross or angry, knew that there must be something wrong. She must be ill, he thought; to-morrow or the next day she will be well again. So he urged her to rest well, and took no notice of her angry words; but the next day, and the next, there was no change, and things were growing from bad to worse. For now the wife wouldn’t speak to him at all, and when she came nigh him she looked at him with anger, and would not even suffer him to touch the hem of her dress. Then the potter began to think of the little brown cup, and he looked up at the shelf and saw that it was not there, and he began to feel very much alarmed.
“Why,” he said, “what has become of my little old brown cup that used to stand up on the shelf?”
“I gave it to a gipsy man,” she answered scornfully. “He seemed to like it, and I didn’t see that I was obliged to keep all the rubbish that you had in the house.”
Then the potter groaned within himself and said,
“But did you just take it off the shelf and give it to him, and did he ask you for it? Why did he want it?”
“Of course he asked for it,” said the wife very angrily, “and I just gave it him when I had drunk his health out of it, as he wished me to.”