GOLD of gorse and purple of heather, a shimmering haze of heat quivering above the undulating green of the moor, and somewhere, high up in the cloud-flecked blue above, the exultant, piercingly sweet carol of a lark.

“Oh! How utterly perfect this is!” sighed Jean.

She was lying at full length on the springy turf, her chin cupped in her hands, her elbows denting little cosy hollows of darkness in the close mesh of green moss.

Tormarin, equally prone, was beside her, his eyes absorbing, not the open vista of rolling moor, hummocked with jagged tors of brown-grey stone, but the sun as it rioted through a glory of red-brown hair and touched changeful gleams of gold into topaz eyes.

There was a queer little throb in Jean’s voice, the low note of almost passionate delight which sheer beauty never failed to draw from her. It plucked at the chords of memory, and Tormarin’s thoughts leaped back suddenly to that day they had spent together in the mountains, when, as they emerged from the pinewood’s gloom to the revelation of the great white-pinacled Alps, she had turned to him with the rapt cry: “It’s so beautiful that it makes one’s heart ache!”

“Do you remember——” he began involuntarily, then checked himself.

“’M—m?” she queried. The little interrogative murmur was tantalising in its soft note of intimacy.

The Jean of the last few days—the days immediately following their quarrel—had temporarily vanished. The beauty of the Moor had taken hold of her, and all the mockery and bitter-sweetness which she had latterly reserved for Torin arm’s benefit was absent from her manner. She was just her natural sweet and wholesome self.

“’M—m? Do I remember—what?”

“I was thinking what a pagan little beauty-lover you are! You worshipped the Alps. How you are worshipping Dartmoor.”

She nodded.

“I don’t see why you should call it ‘pagan,’ though. I should say it was equally Christian. I think we were meant to love beauty. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been such a lot of it about. God didn’t put it around just by accident.”

“Quite probably you’re right,” agreed Blaise. “In which case you must be”—he smiled—“an excellent Christian.”

“Positively I believe they’re talking theology!”

Claire’s voice, girlishly gay and free from the nervous restraint which normally dulled its cadence of youth, broke suddenly on their ears, as she and Nick, rounding the corner of a big granite boulder, discovered the two recumbent forms.

“You disgustingly lazy people!” she pursued indignantly. “Everybody’s dashing wildly to and fro unpacking the lunch baskets, while you two are just lounging here in blissful idleness!”

“It’s chronic with me,” murmured Tormarin lazily. “And anyway, Claire, neither you nor Nick appear to be precisely overtaxing yourselves bearing nectar and ambrosia.”

“I carried some of the drinks up this confounded hill,” submitted Nick. “And damned heavy they were, too! I can’t think”—plaintively—“why people should be so thirsty at a picnic. I’m sure Baines has shoved in enough liquid refreshment to float a ship.”

“Praise be!” interpolated Blaise piously.

“Oh, we’ve done our share,” supplemented Claire. “And now we’re going to the gipsy who lives here to have our fortunes told.”

“Before lunch,” subjoined Nick, “so that in case they’re depressingly bad you can stay us with flagons afterwards.”

Jean sat up suddenly, her face alight with interest “Do you mean that there is a real gipsy who tells real fortunes?” she demanded.

“Yes—quite real. She’s supposed to be extraordinarily good,” replied Nick. “She is a lady of property, too, since she has acquired a few square yards of the Moor from the Duchy and built herself a little shanty there. She rejoices in the name of Keturah Stanley.”

“I should like to have my fortune told,” murmured Jean meditatively.

“I’ll take you,” volunteered Blaise.

There was a suddenly alert look in his face, as though he, too, would like to hear Jean’s fortune told.

“We’ll all go, then,” said Claire. “You must let Keturah tell yours as well, Blaise.”

He shook his head.

“Thanks, no,” he answered briefly. “I know my fortune quite as well as I have any wish to.”

Tormarin’s curt refusal somewhat quenched the gaiety of the moment, and rather soberly they all four made their way down the slope to where, in a little sheltered hollow at the foot of the tor, the sunlight glinted on the corrugated iron roofing of a tiny two-roomed hut, built of wood.

Outside, sitting on an inverted pail and composedly puffing away at a clay pipe, they discovered a small, shrivelled old woman, sunning herself, like a cat, in the midday warmth.

She lifted her head as they approached, revealing an immensely old, delicately-featured face, which might have been carved out of yellow ivory. It was a network of wrinkles, colourless save for the piercing black eyes that sparkled beneath arched black brows, while the fine-cut nostrils and beautifully moulded mouth spoke unmistakably of race—of the old untainted blood which in some gipsy families has run clear, unmixed and undiluted, through countless generations.

There was an odd dignity about the shrunken, still upright figure as she rose from her seat—the freedom of one whose neck has never bowed to the yoke of established custom, whose kingdom is the sun and sea and earth and air as God gave them to Adam—and when the visitors had explained their errand, and she proceeded to answer them in the soft, slurred accents of the Devon dialect, the illiterate speech seemed to convey a strange sense of unfitness.

Claire and Nick were the first to dare the oracle. The old woman beckoned to them to follow her into the cottage, while Tormarin and Jean waited outside, and when they emerged once more, both were laughing, their faces eager and half excited like the faces of children promised some indefinite treat.

“She’s given you luck, then?” asked Jean, smiling in sympathy.

The gipsy interposed quickly.

“Tezn’t for me to give nor take away the luck. But I knaw that, back o’ they gert black clouds the young lady’s so mortal feared of, the zun’s shinin’ butivul. I tell ’ee, me dear”—nodding encouragingly to Claire, while her keen old eyes narrowed to mere pin-points of light—“you’ll zee it, yourself—and afore another year’s crep’ by. ’Ess, fay! You’ll knaw then as I tolled ’ee trew.”

Then, with a gesture that summoned Jean to follow her, she disappeared once more into the interior of the hut.

Jean hesitated nervously in the doorway. For a moment she was conscious of an acute feeling of distaste for the impending interview—a dread of what this woman, whose eyes seemed the only live thing in her old, old face, might have to tell her.

“Come with me,” she appealed to Blaise. And he nodded and followed her across the threshold.

The scent of a peat fire came warm and fragrant to her nostrils as she steppe............