But the woman cut her short. "I know; I know. She has lost a thimble. And, if she wants to find it, let her come to-morrow to the spring by the brook, and bring something which has lain by the thimble,—something of silver if it was silver, and of gold if it was gold,—and she shall know all she desires. But let her beware how she deceives or trifles with the gipsy-woman, lest she rue the day she saw me under the hawthorn tree." Terrified by this threat, all the more alarming from its mystery, and by the frown and glance of the old woman, Lucy tremblingly promised all she required. "Must it be something out of the same box?" she asked. "Yes, out of the same box. Don't fail to let it be of the same metal, or it will do no good. Now, young woman, let me see your hand." The gipsy told Anne a fine fortune, and sent her off greatly pleased. Lucy, however, was not so well satisfied. She knew instinctively that Cousin Deborah would never let her go to meet the gipsy-woman, and that she must do so by stealth, if at all. Here was a new labyrinth of deceit opening upon her. "Oh, what a tangled web we weave When first we practise to deceive!" These lines were not written in Lady Lucy's day, or she might have remembered them. She had made a resolution that she would never tell another lie; but what was to become of that resolution now? And what was it but stealing, if she took something else out of the box? But, then, if she did not? Lucy shuddered. She was timid by nature, and still more by education; and the thought of the gipsy's threats made her tremble and turn cold. It is to be hoped that almost any little girl of the present day would have more sense than to be influenced as Lucy was. And yet I am not sure that one could not find both children and grown-up people doing quite as foolish things as going to a gipsy-woman about a lost thimble. Indeed, if there can be said to be any sense in the matter, there would seem to be two or three grains more in going to a live woman for information than in asking a dead table. But Lucy had never been taught any better: indeed, what teaching she had ever received on the subject had been the other way. You may easily see how Lady Lucy was prepared to fall into the snare which the gipsy-woman had laid for her. She no more doubted that the woman could tell where the thimble was, than she doubted that she had lost it. And she felt more and more that she would give any thing she had to get it into her own possession again: first, because, despite Cousin Deborah's kindness, she could not divest herself of the idea that she should be severely punished if it were known that she had lost it; and secondly, because she could not bear to part with the thimble her dear mamma had used when a little girl like herself.