“And I am sure it was he who peered through the skylight on the first night I danced the dance to the God of Fire,” she told herself. Involuntarily her eyes strayed to that skylight. There was no shadow there now.
“Could it have been that man who stole the God of Fire and sent it to America?” she asked herself. “Did he follow, only to find that it had been lost? And if so, what will he do to retrieve it?”
Knowing all too well the answer to this last question, she shuddered. A strange people, the gypsies care little for laws other than their own. If this man felt that he could formulate a claim to the gypsy God of Fire, he would stop at nothing to retake it.
“But he shall not have it!” she clenched her small hands tight.
From the gypsies she had absorbed a spirit of determination that was unshakable.
She thought of the flutter of wings in the theatre. “Some bird,” she reassured herself. “But what sort of bird? And who let him in?” Her mind was far from at rest on this point.
Nor did the thoughts that came to her as she recalled the “battle of Maxwell Street” bring her comfort. “Angelo was right,” she told herself. “It should not have happened. In times like these one cannot have too many friends; but one enemy is just one too many.”
Warming thoughts filled with great comfort came to her only when she recalled again the three traveling bags. “Ah! There is joy,” she breathed. “To serve another. And he was so big and kind. Perhaps he will come for the bags. It may be that I shall see him again.”
With this comforting thought she curled up in her chair. And there, half an hour later the others, on returning, found her, fast asleep.