The upshot was that we were allowed to depart indebted to the innkeeper in the sum of eightpence. The loss of our money was a blow. Why it should have been I cannot tell, for after all it was very little the right side of destitution. Cynthia was quite unable to say in what manner she had lost it, and when I came to put a few shrewd questions to her on the subject, she was so vague in her ideas and so uncertain in her answers, that it became a moot point at last whether her fortune of twelvepence halfpenny had not existed from the first in her imagination only. CHAPTER X WE ARE BESET BY A HEAVY MISFORTUNE It was about sundown now. We had not so much as a penny to purchase a loaf of bread. Night was coming on; there were no friends to whom we might recommend ourselves; and at least two parties of persons were engaged in hunting us down in that vicinity. To set against these inconveniences we had only our liberty and our comradeship; and although our bellies were like to go empty, and our heads unpillowed that night, and for full many a weary one to come, we did not rail against our lot. We were as free as the air and could defy the polite conventions. Lest we should fall in again with Mr. Waring and our papa, or less dangerously with Mr. Jeremy, we decided to forsake the high road and its publicity, and take to the fields. All ways were alike to us; north, south, east, and west, it did not matter. We had not gone far across the country when the twilight overtook us. We did not view it with the least apprehension, however. The night promised to be so mild, and we were so warmly found against it with our cloaks and thick clothes, that another evening couch in a barn or a cowhouse would not greatly daunt us. Indeed we had already made up our minds to this, unless Providence should throw a more luxurious one in our path. In the event this proved to be the case, for after awhile our wanderings brought us to a kind of common, across which smoke was seen to be rising. It came from a fire of sticks as we presently found, and on coming to it, we discovered ourselves in the midst of a gypsy encampment. Four or five persons of a dirty, ragged and uncouth sort, were busying themselves about the fire in various ways. One was tending it with fuel, another was adjusting a great cooking-pot that sat in the midst of the embers, a third was cleaning a clasp-knife with a piece of rag and a tuft of grass, a fourth had two parts of a flute in his hand and was striving to fix them together; an old woman sat staring into the blaze with her hands on her knees, smoking a pipe; and a young woman, by no means destitute of a swarthy beauty, sat beside her with a child at her breast.