The Gypsy in the Parlour Read Online Free Page A

girl? Come in, dear.”
    I hesitated. But I had no reason to draw back, I was inquisitive, and my new aunt’s voice was peculiarly alluring. (So soon I forgot that it was alien.) I went in. The room that had been given her wasn’t small, none of the rooms were small, but it was comparatively bare; an enormous amount of space stretched in all directions round the shabby carpetbag half-emptied in the middle of the floor. Shyness made me fix my eyes on it: it had a pattern of big purplish roses, faded almost to the buff of the ground.
    â€œCome closer, dear,” said Fanny Davis.
    I approached. The dressing-table before which she sat was candle-lit; by their double flames we contemplated each other through the mirror. Without her hat, without the net she had worn at supper, my new aunt looked much younger. Her short dark hair, which she was brushing, stood out in a smoky bush, very soft and fine, yet peculiarly alive—as though it would crackle under the brush as mine did sometimes in a thunderstorm. But it wasn’t what I have been brought up to consider pretty hair. It couldn’t compare with my Aunt Charlotte’s. The face it haloed was small and pale; the eyes looking back at me through the glass, grey, with short dark lashes, were to me unbeautiful. Altogether I marvelled how my Uncle Stephen, used to the splendid Sylvester women, could have fallen in love with such a thin, pale, dusky little gypsy.
    Miss Davis smiled, and from the littered dresser picked out a small paper bag.
    â€œDo you like sweets, little girl?”
    This put me in something of a quandary. I did like sweets, and though I couldn’t have eaten one exactly then, might have saved it till morning; but all my real aunts set their faces against shop-made confectionery. (They said it was kept under the shop-keepers’ beds. Now and again, when they had time, they made me toffee; or sometimes I was allowed to make it for myself, from sugar and our own butter.) The sweets in the proffered bag were fat satiny cushions, suspiciously striped, and moreover the bag itself was imperfectly clean. I felt quite certain that my Aunt Grace would immediately have put all behind the fire. I was also afraid of catching scarlet fever. (Scarlet fever germs notoriously pullulating beneath shop-keepers’ beds.) However, I had been specially instructed to be polite; so I took one, with an appropriate mumble.
    â€œIf you’re my little friend, you shall have sweets every day,” promised Miss Davis. “Sit down, dear, on the bed, and talk to me.”
    I sat, but found I had nothing to say. I was quite glad when she began to ask me questions.
    â€œI suppose I must be causing a great flutter here?” suggested she.
    I thought this over. Children often understand, when an adult questions them, what meaning underlies the surface words. Recalling my aunts’ enormous activities both above and below stairs, I nonetheless replied, No. I said everyone just seemed pleased.
    â€œWhich is the very sweetest thing I could have heard!” cried Miss Davis; but paused a moment, while she brushed her hair right and left into a new halo. I waited. “My dear Stephen told me what I might expect,” said Miss Davis, brushing away, “but really, three such beauties!” Gathering that she meant my aunts, I nodded. “Still, Mrs. Toby is by far the handsomest. I’m sure that’s generally accepted?”
    Translating Mrs. Toby into my Aunt Charlotte, I muttered that I liked her hair.
    â€œBeside which mine is no more than a sweep’s mop?” agreed Miss Davis—I thought very properly. Even when she fluffed it out, it wasn’t thick. “And as Mr . Toby’s the eldest, and she’s his wife—I suppose she has things pretty much her own way?”
    I didn’t know what to answer. Of course my Aunt Charlotte had things her own way—in the house; but as her way was so identically that of