Miss Cass laughed, and, with a nod, took her departure. Mrs. Chisel saw her from the drawing-room window and frowned. "There she goes all alone, to walk by herself," she said, tautologically. "It is positively indecent to see a young girl without a chaperon. But, then, Ruth is so headstrong." And Mrs. Chisel sighed to think how foolish the girl was not to take her for a model. But Ruth's beauty was well protected by Ruth's temper; and she would have travelled through Thibet as fearlessly as she now walked through the lonely country towards the old Turnpike House. With her usual perversity Miss Cass did not keep to the high road as an ordinary young lady should and would have done; she made a bee-line for her destination right across country, She passed through fields, and clambered over hedges; she slipped along by paths, until in a remarkably short space of time she saw the dilapidated house nested in its green jungle. It looked haggard and evil even in the cheerful light of the morning sun. "Well, here I am!" she said, tempting Fate with her usual bold speech. "What is going to happen next?" As if in answer to her call, a face suddenly appeared at the window--the very window, as she believed through which the assassin had struck at his unhappy victim. It was a swarthy, cunning face with coal-black eyes, having over them the kind of film which veils the eyes of birds. The tangled black hair crowned a sallow, lean, Oriental countenance; and the un-English look of the man--for it was a man--was accentuated by a red scarf twisted round a sinewy throat. It was not his foreign appearance that startled Ruth, but the look of death on the face. He was far gone in consumption. Seeing a pretty girl he leered, and cast a sly glance of admiration at her. "Duvel! My beauty," he croaked, hoarsely. "What's to do here?" "Nothing that can possibly matter to you," retorted Miss Cass, who was not to be daunted by a gypsy. "Are you living here?" "I live here at times," said the man, evidently surprised at the boldness of her address, "but mostly I'm on the road and in the tent of the Romany. I'm no Gorgio to care for a roof-tree; but it's cruel work in this England." "I see the climate is killing you," replied Ruth, for she was sorry to see so fine a man suffering from an incurable disease. "You should get a doctor to see you." "Oh, my gorgeous angel, what things you say!" whined the man. "Where am I to get the tizzy to pay? Give me a shilling, Miss." The girl took a half-crown from her pocket and gave it to him. He disappeared from the window and came outside. Man and girl surveyed each other in silence. "What is your name?" Ruth asked coolly. "Job," he said. "I belong to the Lovels, I do. And I'm a Sapengro, I am." "What's that?" Job slipped his hand into his breast and brought out a small viper with gleaming eyes, and a yellow body which glittered like gold. "This is a sap," he said, and held the reptile towards Ruth.