It might
ha' bin some poor innocent as her feyther used to beat. It's
wonderful how cruel Gorgio feythers is to poor born naterals. And she
might ha' heerd in London about St. Winifred's Well a-curin' people.'

'Sinfi,' I said, 'you know there is no hope. And I have no friend but
you now--I am going back to the Romanies.'

'No, no, brother,' she said, 'never no more.'

She put on her shawl. I rose mechanically. When she bade Cyril and
Wilderspin good-bye and passed out of the studio, I did so too. In
the street she stood and looked wistfully at me, as though she saw me
through a mist, and then bade me good-bye, saying that she must go to
Kingston Vale where her people were encamped in a hired field. We
separated, and I wandered I knew not whither.

III

I found myself inquiring for the New North Cemetery, and after a time
I stood looking through the bars of tall iron gates at long lines of
gravestones and dreary hillocks before me. Then I went in, walking
straight over the grass towards a gravedigger digging in the
sunshine. He looked at me, resting his foot on his spade.

'I want to find a grave.'

'What part was the party buried in?'

'The pauper part,' I said.

'Oh,' said he, losing suddenly his respectful tone. 'When was she
buried? I suppose it was a she by the look o' you.'

'When? I don't know the date.'

'Rather a wide order that, but there's the pauper part.' And he
pointed to a spot at some little distance, where there were no
gravestones and no shrubs. I walked across to this Desert of Poverty,
which seemed too cheerless for a place of rest. I stood and gazed at
the mounds till the black coffins underneath grew upon my mental
vision, and seemed to press upon my brain. Thoughts I had none, only
a sense of being another person.

The man came slowly towards me, and then looked meditatively into my
face. I shall never forget him. A tall, sallow, emaciated man he was,
with cheek-bones high and sharp as an American Indian's, and
straight black hair. He looked like a wooden image of Mephistopheles,
carved with a jack-knife.

'Who are you?' The words seemed to come, not from the gravedigger's
mouth, but from those piles of lamp-blacked coffins which were
searing my eyes through four feet of graveyard earth. By the
fever-fires in my brain I seemed to see the very faces of the
corpses.

'Who am I?' I said to myself, as I thought, but evidently aloud;
'I am the Fool of Superstition. I am Fenella St