“Neither am I. If there are gypsies from France in these forests, I wish to see them, to speak their language, to hear them speak my own beloved tongue. In this strange land we have a bond of brotherhood.”
“So that is the way she feels about it!” Florence thought in some surprise. “Then I must find her some gypsies.”
She did find them, and that very soon—the same three who had left their patteran on the dock post. She lost them, too, only to be found by them long weeks afterward under the most unusual circumstances.
In the meantime, there was the rowboat and water that was like glass. She rowed on and on down the bay until the cottages, the store, the ancient sawmill, the dock, were all but specks in the distance. Then, with a fir tree on a point as her guide, she rowed straight for their cabin.
They ate their lunch on the beach that evening. Then Jeanne went for a stroll along the shore.
Florence pushed her boat out into the bay and rowed toward the open lake. She loved this spot. No small lake could have so won her affection. Here in this land-locked bay she was always safe from storms. Yet, just beyond, through the gap between two points of land, she could see Lake Huron. “Makes you feel that you are part of something tremendous,” she had said to Tillie, once. And Tillie had understood.
Now she dropped her oars and sat there alone, watching the light fade from the sky while “some artist Saint spilled his paint adown the western sky.”
She was glad to be alone. She wished to think. Jeanne had a disturbing way of reading one’s thoughts, or very nearly reading them, that was uncanny. It was of Jeanne, in part, that she wished to think.
“It is positively weird,” she told herself, “the way exciting happenings keep bobbing up in this quiet place. Just when I think those gypsies have left these parts and Jeanne is free from any harm they might do her, she discovers that patteran and gets excited about it.”
She had not expected Jeanne to be so anxious to see the gypsies. Now she was in a quandary. Should she attempt to find the gypsies and bring them to Jeanne? She did not doubt that this could be done.