“If I were you I should watch for my husband all day. I would weave my mats in the doorway, and look up the road both ways, from morn till night, otherwise your husband will come back and go past the cottage and you will never know.” So she took her loom and sat by the roadway, and watched, and looked over the hill and to right and left for whoever might come. And often the gipsy boy would watch too, and look from the other side of the cottage while the potter’s wife sat in the front. One day the gipsy boy ran round to her and said, “There is some one coming up the road who will come here, but it is not your husband. It is my father, and he will want to take me away, and he will beat me as he did my mother. And if he gets hold of the cup that my mother made for you, he knows all her charms, and he can undo what she did, and perhaps can throw some evil spell on us all, so that your husband will never return again. So the best thing will be for you to give me the cup and let me hide myself with it, and then you must tell him that you do not know where I am, and if he asks, tell him that the cup is gone; and when he is gone I will come back again, but promise that you will not give me up to him.” So the potter’s wife promised that she would never give up the little boy, and she bid him take the cup and run quickly and hide himself, and then she took her little girl by the hand and sat and waited for the gipsy man to come, though she trembled with fear, and wished him far away. Presently the gipsy man came up to the front of the cottage where the potter’s wife sat, and bid her good-day. “I was here before,” he said. “And you gave me something to eat and drink. Is your husband come back, for he was away then?” “My husband is away still,” she said. “But soon I hope he will be here.” Then the gipsy took up one of her mats which lay on the ground beside her, and looked at it. “You are clever with your loom,” he said; “but what do you mean by the little verse you put on all these mats?” “It is a little verse which can but be rightly read by one person,” she answered; “and if he sees it, it will not matter whether others understand it or no.” “And have you been here all alone since I came by?” asked the gipsy; “have no other gipsies been past? for I want to join some of my own people, and perhaps you can tell me which way they are gone.” “One came not so long ago,” answered the potter’s wife, “but she was so tired with tramping far that she could go no further. So she has stayed, and rests in the churchyard. She was a gipsy woman with red beads and coins in her hair. And I kept her and let her die in peace, and wrapped her in a cloth of white and gold.” “And did she do nothing while she rested here?” asked the gipsy man. “Did she make you no present to pay you for your trouble?”