with you! Begone!" and then bent it again upon her hands,
muttering, "There are plenty of hedges and ditches too good for your
lot, without their coming to worrit us in our wood."

The gipsy girl knelt quietly by the fire, and stirred up the embers.

"What is the matter, mother?" she said. "We've only just come, and when
I heard that Tinker George and his mother were in the wood, I started to
find you. 'You makes too free with the tinkers,' says my brother's
wife. 'I goes to see my mother,' says I, 'who nursed me through a
sickness, my real mother being dead, and my own people wanting to bury
me through my not being able to speak or move, and their wanting to get
to the Bartelmy Fair.' I never forget, mother; have you forgotten me,
that you drives me away for bidding you good-day?"

"Good days are over for me," moaned the old woman. "Begone, I say! Don't
let me see or hear any that belongs to Black Basil, or it may be the
worse for them."

("The tinker-mother whines very nastily," said Mrs. Hedgehog. "If I were
the young woman, I should bite her."

"Hush!" I answered, "she is speaking.")

"Basil is in prison," said the gipsy girl hoarsely.

The old woman's eyes shone in their sockets, as she looked up at Sybil
for a minute, as if to read the gipsy's sentence on her face; and then
she chuckled,

"So they've taken the Terror of the Roads?"

Sybil's eyes had not moved from the fire, before which she was now
standing with clasped hands.

"The Terror of the Roads?" she said. "Yes, they call him that,--but I
could turn him round my finger, mother." Her voice had dropped, and she
smoothed one of her black curls absently round her finger as she spoke.

"You couldn't keep him out of prison," taunted the old woman.

"I couldn't keep him out of mischief," said the girl, sadly; and then,
with a sudden flash of anger, she clasped her hands above her head and
cried, "A black curse on Jemmy and his gang!"

"A black curse on them as lets the innocent go to prison in their stead.
They comes there themselves in the end, and long may it hold them!" was
the reply.

Sybil moved swiftly to the old woman's side.

"I heard you was in trouble, mother, about Christian; but you don't
think--"

"_Think!_" screamed the old woman, shaking her fists, whilst the girl
interrupted her--

"Hush, mother, hush! tell me now, tell me all, but not so loud," and
kneeling with her back to us, she said something more in a low voice, to
whi