"What be you all at there?" she called out in a tremor. "Who is that? Sally, this kitchen is not your place; what do you do in it?"
The Sussex girl, who may have been addressed because she was the tallest and biggest, turned her laughing face to her mistress and went into the parlour. Dorothy, not feeling herself very competent to cope with this, was sitting down again.
"Oh, missus, do ye not be angry now," said the girl in her good-humoured way. "We be only having our fortins told; she'll be gone directly. She do be and say as my man'll be a soldier, and I'll have to ride on the baggige-waggin."
Dorothy took heart and courage--what would Miss Winter say if she knew that she had allowed this? "I order you to be gone," she said, her quavering voice marring the implied authority in no small degree. "Go out of the house at once; how dared you to come into it?"
"Hush! It be Mrs. Stone, the housekeeper," whispered Phemie. "You had better go."
The gipsy woman rose, showing her large white teeth, and strode to the door of the inner room. "Let the poor gipsy tell your fortune, good mistress," she said, with smiling lips and a curtsey.
For once Dorothy was roused to anger. "Go away, you bold woman!" she cried shrilly. "Don't attempt to tell your lies to me. You have told enough to those silly girls."
The gipsy's face darkened; she strode a pace or two into the room. "I have been telling lies, have I? Well, then, let me tell the truth to you:" and, bending her tall form, she whispered a few words rapidly in the old woman's ear.
Dorothy's face turned ashy white as she heard them. She sank back in her chair with a low cry.
"Is that the truth, or is it not?" asked the gipsy.
But Dorothy could not answer. She could only stare tremblingly and helplessly at the fortune-teller.
The gipsy turned to the wondering maids. "Shut that door and leave us together," she said in an imperious tone. "This good mistress here and I have something to say to each other."
The door was closed immediately, and the two women were left alone. The servants waited long enough to grow uncomfortable. What could that strange gipsy woman be doing with the old missis?
"We had better go in and see that all's right," at length spoke Phemie, who had perhaps a shade more thought than the rest, "She may have frighted her into a fit."