Pussy screamed. Joe only backed astern and was beginning to laugh when he received a smack on the face that made him stagger. 'You--you--you _wretch_!' he screamed; but he flew back to his perch and laughed now till the welkin rang. Tim disappeared. The cat was angrily wagging her tail, and no doubt making up her mind to pay Joe out first chance. Tod Lowrie got up and stretched himself, and Wallace placed his great wise head on the tablecloth close to Crona's elbow. Then every pet had a tit-bit, and peace was restored once more. 'Come over often to see poor Crona,' said the witch to Antony when leaving. 'There is that in your eye which Crona loves.' He held out his hand to shake 'good-bye.' Crona took it and looked at the palm. Then her face clouded. Antony Blake was not slow to mark the change, and laughingly asked if she saw anything strange in his palm. 'It was but a cursory glance,' she said. 'I could not say. There may be nothing in palmistry, but, again, there may be something. Come again, and come alone.' The last words were spoken in almost a whisper, and Antony went away wondering. * * * * * Biffins Lee was an up-to-date gipsy, and did not trust entirely to horses to take the Queerest Show around the country when he made up his mind to change ground. He had a very smart and pretty steam-engine, which hauled three immense vans. Others came on behind with horses. The engine at present was stored on his own camping-ground here--which, by the way he rented from a neighbouring 'laird'--and was carefully housed and taken care of. His horses were farmed cheaply enough. Whatever the man's character may have been, one could not help admiring his business capabilities--that is, if admiration can be bestowed on mere cleverness in making money. Frank Antony was not long in finding out that the man had one other reason for pitching camp so far north as this: he did a roaring trade in Shetland and Icelandic ponies, and had agents even in Shetland and Iceland picking these up and shipping them south. But the Queerest Show paid even here, because seldom a week in winter passed that he did not have some strange addition to it; and when he got tired of this he let it go and had a change. Once, indeed, during the summer holiday season--so Mary the Skeleton's wife told Antony--he hired for exhibition purposes the whole of a celebrated hunter's trophies in the shape of skins of lions, elephants' skeletons, and marvels no end from the far interior of Africa. He had dwarfs too, sometimes, and wild men from every region on earth. Biffins Lee knew the secret of making his dwarfs look still smaller and his wild men wilder. In brief, everybody visited the Queerest Show from every town within a radius of a hundred miles, always certain they would see marvels well worth looking at and remembering afterwards.