“Cross! and enough to make him cross!” returned she, taking up the implication warmly. “I ask your pard’n, sir, for speaking so to you; but I’d like to know what gentleman could help being cross when that yellow gipsy comes to attack him with her slanderous tongue, and say to him, Have you come across to my hut in the night and stole my daughter out of it?”
“You think your master did not go across and commit the theft?”
“I know he did not,” was Preen’s indignant answer. “He never stirred out of his own home, sir, all last night; he was nursing his throat indoors. At ten o’clock he went to bed, and I took him up a posset after he was in it. Well, sir, I was uneasy, for I don’t like these sore throats, and between two and three o’clock I crept into his room and found him sleeping quietly; and I was in again this morning and woke him up with a cup o’ tea.”
“A pretty good proof that he did not go out,” said Duffham.
“He never was as much as out of his bed, sir. The man that sleeps indoors locked up the house last night, and opened it again this morning. Ketira the gipsy would be in gaol if she got her deservings!”
“I wonder where the rest of us would be if we got ours!” quoth Duffham. “I suppose I had better go back and take a look at this throat!”
To see the miserable distress of Ketira that day, and the despair upon her face as she dodged about between Virginia Cottage and the brickfields, was like a gloomy picture.
“Do you remember telling me once that you feared Kettie might run away to the tribe?” I asked, meeting her on one of these wanderings in the afternoon. “Perhaps that is where she is gone?”
The suggestion seemed to offend her mortally. “Boy, I know better,” she said, facing round upon me fiercely. “With the tribe she would be safe, and I at rest. The stars never deceive me.”
And, when the sun went down that night and the stars came out, the environs of Virginia Cottage were still haunted by Ketira the gipsy.