It was quite seventeen years ago that the lady’s cousin, a stern, domineering soldier, had stalked into her library one day, saying abruptly: “Cyrilla, there are some impudent, thieving gipsies camped in your south meadow, and I have taken the liberty of driving them off. I gave orders for them to be gone bag and baggage before dark.” “But was that necessary, Eustis? They have camped on my lands several times before, and never did any harm that I know of, and they amused the young people of the neighborhood telling their fortunes,” remonstrated the spinster mildly. “They know no more of the future than you or I, Cyrilla!” he returned sharply, without taking the trouble to tell her that the enraged gipsy queen had told his fortune gratis in a string of maledictions, prophesying unnumbered evils on his luckless head. He had cursed her in return for an impudent jade, and strode from the camp with a brow as black as night, shuddering, in spite of himself at her invocations of the Evil One’s power, though he was not superstitious enough to place any confidence in the efficacy of her prayers. Be that as it may, the Fates were weaving a grim web about Colonel Ritchie’s future, and before midnight he was summoned to his city home by a telegram announcing the death of a near and dear relative. Though he had only arrived that day with his wife and little daughter, Lelia, for a month’s visit at The Crags, they left by the first train for their city home, and he never returned, for his death occurred two years later in the Indian Territory, while gallantly leading a charge against a hostile tribe. Thus he never knew that the banished gipsies had forgotten or deserted a lovely, dark-eyed babe in their flight. It was found in the woods next morning by the servants of Miss Willoughby, and carried to The Crags. And for beauty and brightness, every one vowed that the half-naked little waif had never had an equal. Just a few months old, it smiled into their faces, cooing and gurgling so engagingly that it won every heart by its infantile pleading of its own cause. “It must be sent to the poorhouse!” announced Miss Willoughby unconcernedly. What was a pretty gipsy brat to her, a Willoughby! But Jane Dobbs, the new housekeeper, clasped it to her heart, begging to keep it for her own. “It’s just the age of the one I lost, and it’ll be sech a comfort to me, please ’m!” she sobbed humbly. “Keep it, then, so that it does not interfere with your work, or bother me,” returned the spinster carelessly, and thus the little gipsy came to belong to The Crags. Gipsy--that was what they always called her, every one at The Crags, and it was no matter that Jane Dobbs bestowed on her protégée a string of high-sounding names, they were all ignored, and she soon came to know and answer to the first one. For her surname little Lelia Ritchie, when she visited The Crags soon after the colonel’s death, became responsible.