'The Pink Cart'

A boy of about fifteen tells of the visit of a gypsy family who are friends with his grandfather.

Their teenaged daughter is deathly ill: 'Sometimes as she bent over the cat her hair fell down in black tangles over her face and in the sudden jerks of her head as she tossed it back again, and in the gold flash of her earrings I would catch for an instant the flash of her own spirit and the spirit of her race before sickness and poverty had degraded them, wild, careless, proud, passionate-blooded.' They promise to return in the spring, but he never sees them again.

A manuscript, dated December 1932, is held in the collection of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, USA. (https://archives.iu.edu/catalog/InU-Li-VAD6063)

In John O'London's Weekly (February 18, 1933), The House with the Apricot and Two Other Tales (1933), Cut and Come Again (1935), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales: Collected Short Stories (1940). Reprinted in the Timaru Herald (November 16, 1935, p. 9, with the title 'The Passing of the Caravan').