“Well, you let him in, I suppose?”

“I let him in—­a strange-looking object, Olivia, like no creature I ever saw before, with flowing beard and hair silver-white—­”

“False, no doubt.”

“He wore a long, disguising cloak and a skull-cap,” went on Sir Jasper, “and his face was blanched to a dull dead white.  He would have looked like a resuscitated corpse, only for a pair of burning black eyes.”

“Quite a startling apparition!  Melodramatic in the extreme!  And this singular being—­what was he?  Clairvoyant, astrologer, what?”

“Astrologer—­an Eastern astrologer—­Achmet by name.”

“And who, probably, never was further than London in his life-time.  A well-got-up charlatan, no doubt.”

“Charlatan he may have been; Englishman he was not.  His face, his speech, convinced me of that.  And, Olivia, charlatan or no, he told me my past life as truly as I knew it myself.”

Lady Kingsland listened with a quiet smile.

“No doubt he has been talking to the good people of the village and to the servants in the house.”

“Neither the people of the village nor the servants of the house know aught of what he told me.  He showed me what transpired twenty years ago.

“Twenty years ago?”

“Yes, when I was fresh from Cambridge, and making my first tour.  Events that occurred in Spain—­that no one under heaven save myself can know of—­he told me.”

“That was strange!”

“Olivia, it was astounding—­incomprehensible!  I should never have credited one word he said but for that.  He told me the past as I know it myself.  Events that transpired in a far foreign land a score of years ago, known, as I thought, to no creature under heaven, he told me of as if they had transpired yesterday.  The very thoughts that I thought in that by-gone time he revealed as if my heart lay open before him.  How, then, could I doubt?  If he could lift the veil of the irrevocable past, why not be able to lift the veil of the mysterious future?  He took the hour of our child’s birth and ascended to the battlements, and there, alone with the stars of heaven, he cast his horoscope.  Olivia, men in all ages have believed in this power of astrology, and I believe as firmly as I believe in Heaven.”

Lady Kingsland listened, and that quiet smile of half amusement, half contempt never left her lips.

“And the horoscope proved a horrorscope, no doubt,” she said, the smile deepening.  “You paid your astrologer handsomely, I presume, Sir Jasper?”

“I gave him nothing.  He would take nothing—­not even a cup of water.  Of his own free will he cast the horoscope, and, without reward of any kind, went his way when he had done.”

“What did you say the name was?”

“Achmet the Astrologer.”

“Melodramatic again!  And now, Sir Jasper, what awful fate betides our boy?”

“Ask me not!  You do not believe.  What the astrologer foretold I shall tell no one.”