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it, I think. The return of the gypsies might make an excellent excuse. She could say she got it back from them somehow. If it reappears, we shall know very well she stole it. Not that we could do a thing about it.”
    “She’s horrid,” Aurora decided.
    “Indeed she is, but at least I got back my firescreen, and she is welcome to the necklace.”
    When they returned home, Malone demanded to know what the summons had been all about, and was told. “She hopes to trod her toe into decent society, does she?” she said, undeceived as to Charles’s being involved in any other capacity than an excuse. “Down dancing with the gypsies is where she belongs. Oh, I must warn you, there was one of them spying around this morning. A handsome rascal he was. Halter ran him off from the chicken coop. Empty-handed. He didn’t steal any. There’s none missing yet. I’ll keep my Mimi tied to my apron strings while they’re about, vicious brutes. At the far end of the woods is where they’re camped, down at the stream. What they’d want with water I can’t imagine, for it’s plain as a pikestaff it never touches their hides, and it’s not water they drink, or I’m a living saint. Heathen creatures.
    “Come on and eat, then,” she continued. “Cook has made you up a mess of potash that he calls ragoot. Well named too—smells like boiled eggs. What a lady would want to be eating such glue for when there’s good ham and mutton in her larder is above and beyond me. I like to know what I’m eating. But the Frenchies are all alike, they don’t know a thing about cooking, but only that old French kweezeen. You made a big mistake to hire that foreigner, missie. Eats his weight in toadstools every day. I never saw such a man for stuffing hisself with toadstools, as though he was a fowl to grace the table. At least they’re free. He tossed some of them into your ragoot, but you just pluck them out. Don’t go sullying your insides with parasites.” She was off to rescue Mimi from her governess, and see that that woman didn’t go feeding the child toadstools.
    Mr. Berrigan came to call in the afternoon. He had been a friend of Bernard’s, and had begun his calls as a friend and business adviser to the widow. By the time the business was settled, he had grown into a suitor, and before many months it was assumed he would escalate into a husband. Malone had not accepted him as a suitor for her mistress yet. He smoked nasty cigars and occasionally ruined his appearance by a Belcher kerchief, but on the other hand he knuckled under to her very mildly, and called her Mrs. Malone, which she rather liked. She had never had a husband nor wanted one, but liked the dignity of being called Mrs.
    Aurora felt a bit out of place when Mr. Berrigan came. It was quite plain he desired privacy with her sister, and lately she thought Marnie wanted a little privacy with him too. After she had chaperoned them for fifteen minutes, she said, “I think I’ll go for a walk in the meadow.”
    “Remember the gypsies are in the forest,” Marnie reminded her.
    “They are at the far end, where the stream widens. I might just go in a little and pick some wild flowers. There are some lovely bluebells there.”
    She did as she had mentioned, walking slowly through the grass that was already hip-high, soaking up the sun. She picked a few random flowers as she went, and when she got to the edge of the forest, she stopped, undecided. The gypsy camp was three miles away. She would enter just a little. The gray walls of the Dower House were still visible behind her. The gypsies would not be brazen enough to come this close, and wouldn’t harm her, one of the ladies of the place, in any case. Yet as she glanced down at her plain blue dimity gown, she realized she didn’t look so very like a lady. Malone was supervising a washing that afternoon, and had commanded her into this old frock.
    Peering in at the edge of the forest, there was no sound but the cooing of