“There’s a golden-haired French girl,” Danby Force was speaking again. “She travels in an airplane with a gypsy woman and a child. Strange combination,” he mused. Then, more briskly, “They have a secret of dyeing in purple that would be of immense value to us. But it belongs to hundreds of gypsies in France. Dare we ask her to reveal that secret? Have we a right to it? That, for the moment, is a question. I am unable to answer.”
“Yes,” Rosemary replied, “I too know Petite Jeanne. She is a dear!”
Little did either of them realize that at this very moment Jeanne was close at hand, on Happy Vale’s landing field. Rosemary left that very field an hour later without discovering Jeanne’s presence.
That afternoon, on wandering across the grounds before the mill, Florence came face to face with Hugo. He appeared quite worried and ill at ease. His attempt to favor her with one of his dazzling smiles was a failure.
“Does he know I took the picture?” she asked herself after he had passed on. “Does he know about the camera? And was it his camera?”
As she closed her eyes and tried to picture to herself the face of the spy she had so long sought, she saw not Miriam Dvorac and her dark sister, not Hans Schneider, not Ina Piccalo and not the curious person who trimmed the shrubs about the grounds. Instead, a very different face appeared, a smiling face she had seen many times before. Startled by this picture, she exclaimed: “No! No! It cannot be!” And yet the picture remained.
Yes, as Florence had guessed, Hugo was troubled, so very much troubled that any person with an eye for such things could have told it quickly enough. And he was superstitious. Oh, very much so! Selfish people who think much of their own happiness and very little of others are likely to be superstitious. So, when one of his fellow-workers told him that something very strange had happened—that two gypsies, one very old and dark, and one young, blonde and beautiful, had come flying in from the air, he said at once: “It is Fate. I shall have my fortune told.”
Jeanne was not in sight when he arrived. Madame Bihari, seated upon her bright rug before the tent, was shuffling her witch cards. Shuffling, dealing, then gathering them up to shuffle and deal again, she did not so much as look up as Hugo, magnificent in his bright garments, approached. His roving eyes sought in vain for the beautiful young gypsy. His countenance fell.
“But after all,” he reasoned, “I came to have my fortune told. The older ones are best for that.”
“Old woman,” he said rather rudely, “tell my fortune.”