“You underrate your powers,” observed Miss Latouche with calm conviction.  “Nature has endowed you with a most unusual organisation.  Your powers are quite involuntary.  Nothing you say or do can make the slightest difference.  You are merely a passive agent for the transmission of electric force.”

“Do you mean a sort of telegraph wire?” I gasped, feebly.

“If you offer no resistance, all will be well with us,” continued Miss Latouche, ignoring the interruption; “but the Unseen Powers will bear no trifling, and I can summon those to my aid who will make you bitterly repent any levity!”

I hate those sort of vague prophecies.  They frighten one quite out of proportion to their real gravity.

“By the bye, I don’t yet understand the reason you wouldn’t tell my fortune, as you seem to know such a lot about those things,” I said at last.

“What!  You do not understand yet that there is a bond between us which makes any concealment impossible?  I could not blind you with the paltry fictions that satisfy those poor fools!” and she waved her hand contemptuously towards the distant figures of the tennis players, amongst whom Mr. Tucker, in a wonderful costume, was distinctly visible.  The expression struck me as unjustifiably strong, even when applied to a man who sang comic songs with a banjo accompaniment.

“I don’t think he is a bad little chap,” I said, apologetically.

“They are all alike,” she replied, with an air of ineffable scorn.  “You can only content them with idle promises of love and wealth, like the ignorant village girl who crosses a gipsy’s hand with silver and in return is promised a rich husband.  And all the while I see the dark cloud hanging over them and can do nothing to avert it.  Ah! it is terrible to know the evil to come and be powerless to warn others!  To be obliged to smile whilst one’s heart is wrung with anguish and one’s brain tortured with nameless apprehensions; that is indeed misery!”

“Dear me!” I said, nervously; “I hope you don’t foresee any catastrophe about to overwhelm me?”

She gazed straight into my eyes, and her passionate face gradually softened into a lovely smile.

“No, my only friend!” she exclaimed, taking my hand gently in hers; “so far, no cloud darkens the perfect happiness of our intercourse!”

I felt that there were moments of compensation even in the pursuit of the Black Arts!

III.

It was a curious sensation, mixing again with the commonplace pleasure-seekers at Longacres, conscious that I was the repository of such extraordinary revelations.  For, before we left our damp retreat, Irene had confided in me the secret history of her life.  Not that I understood it very clearly, owing to her voice being continually choked by stifled emotion.  But I gathered that a person, presumably of the male sex,