“Do you like Rhoda’s songs?” he asked suddenly.
“Oh yes.”
“She makes them for me,” said Dan.
“I am going to take Alfonso and the other cock to see her,” continued Maggie. “Perhaps I shall go to-morrow.”
“Then I had better come with you. There are wild-cats in the wood,” observed Dan shortly. And he went into the green van and said no more.
After that Maggie managed to slip away nearly every day to see her friend in the other camp. Sometimes she took the birds with her, and sometimes she left them at home. Dan and his brother had gone off to a fair in the neighbourhood, which was to last several days.
One afternoon as she sat with Rhoda under the trees, a man came towards them from the tents. He had a long pointed nose, and was very grandly dressed for a gipsy, for he wore a bright-coloured scarf and waistcoat and his fingers were covered with silver rings. Maggie thought him very nice, for he joined them and seemed to admire Alfonso very much. The little cock strutted about, ruffling himself out as the man watched him. He loved notice. The gipsy threw him a handful of corn from his pocket, and when he went off again to the tents, he kept looking back with a smile. Rhoda took up her guitar once more for she had laid it down at his approach, though she was in the middle of a song.
“I never sing to him,” she said.
It was a pleasant time they spent in the fir-woods, and Maggie began to think there could be nothing better than life in the caravan. She loved the open air and the blue mists, the silver spider webs and the winking eyes of the little fires that were lit among the trees at night. She loved the whispering branches and the red toadstools and the sceptres of tall ragwort, that were beginning to fade as the days went by. She did not want to leave the place, and, besides that, she did not want to leave Rhoda.
But early one morning, as she was gathering wood a little way from the van, she glanced up to find Rhoda standing before her. Her guitar was under her arm and a little bundle in her hand.