Suddenly Madame Cagliostra began to speak in a quick, clear, monotonous voice.

Keeping her eyes fixed on the cards, which now and again she touched with a fat finger, and without looking at Sylvia, she said: 

“Madame has led a very placid, quiet life.  Her existence has been a boat that has always lain in harbour—­” She suddenly looked up:  “I spent my childhood at Dieppe, and that often suggests images to me,” she observed complacently, and then she went on in quite another tone of voice:—­

“To return to Madame and her fate!  The boat has always been in harbour, but now it is about to put out to sea.  It will meet there another craft.  This other craft is, to Madame, a foreign craft, and I grieve to say it, rather battered.  But its timbers are sound, and that is well, for it looks to me as if the sails of Madame’s boat would mingle, at any rate for a time with this battered craft.”

“I don’t understand what she means,” said Sylvia, in a whisper.  “Do ask her to explain, Anna!”

“My friend asks you to drop metaphor,” said the older woman, drily.

The soothsayer fixed her bright, beady little eyes on Sylvia’s flushed face.

“Well,” she said deliberately, “I see you falling in love, and I also see that falling in love is quite a new experience.  It burns, it scorches you, does love, Madame.  And for awhile you do not know what it means, for love has never yet touched you with his red-hot finger.”

“How absurd!” thought Sylvia to herself.  “She actually takes me for a young girl!  What ridiculous mistakes fortune-tellers do make, to be sure!”

“—­But you cannot escape love,” went on Madame Cagliostra, eagerly.  “Your fate is a fair man, which is strange considering that you also are a fair woman; and I see that there is already a dark man in your life.”

Sylvia blushed.  Bill Chester, just now the only man in her life, was a very dark man.

“But this fair man knows all the arts of love.”  Madame Cagliostra sighed, her voice softened, it became strangely low and sweet.  “He will love you tenderly as well as passionately.  And as for you, Madame—­but no, for me to tell you what you will feel and what you will do would not be delicate on my part!”

Sylvia grew redder and redder.  She tried to laugh, but failed.  She felt angry, and not a little disgusted.

“You are a foreigner,” went on Madame Cagliostra.  Her voice had grown hard and expressionless again.

Sylvia smiled a little satiric smile.

“But though you are a foreigner,” cried the fortune-teller with sudden energy, “it is quite possible that you will never go back to your own country!  Stop—­or, perhaps, I shall say too much!  Still if you ever do go back, it will be as a stranger.  That I say with certainty.  And I add that I hope with all my heart that you will live to go back to your own country, Madame!”

Sylvia felt a vague, uneasy feeling of oppression, almost of fear, steal over her.  It seemed to her that Madame Cagliostra was looking at her with puzzled, pitying eyes.