"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.
The soothsayer again put a fat and not too clean finger down on the upturned face of a card.
"There is something here I do not understand; something which I miss when I look at you as I am now looking at you. It is something you always wear—"
She gazed searchingly at Sylvia, and her eyes travelled over Mrs. Bailey's neck and bosom.
"I see them and yet they are not there! They appear like little balls of light. Surely it is a necklace?"
Sylvia looked extremely surprised. Now, at last, Madame Cagliostra was justifying her claim to a supernatural gift!
"These balls of light are also your Fate!" exclaimed the woman impetuously. "If you had them here—I care not what they be—I should entreat you to give them to me to throw away."
Madame Wolsky began to laugh. "I don't think you would do that," she observed drily.
But Madame Cagliostra did not seem to hear the interruption.
"Have you heard of a mascot?" she said abruptly. "Of a mascot which brings good fortune to its wearer?"
Sylvia bent her head. Of course she had heard of mascots.
"Well, if so, you have, of course, heard of objects which bring misfortune to their wearers—which are, so to speak, unlucky mascots?"
And this time it was Anna Wolsky who, leaning forward, nodded gravely. She attributed a run of bad luck she had had the year before to a trifling gift, twin cherries made of enamel, which a friend had given her, in her old home, on her birthday. Till she had thrown that little brooch into the sea, she had been persistently unlucky at play.
"Your friend," murmured Madame Cagliostra, now addressing herself to Anna and not to Sylvia, "should dispossess herself as quickly as possible of her necklace, of these round balls. They have already brought her ill-fortune in the past, they have lowered her in the estimation of an estimable person—in fact, if she is not very careful, indeed, even if she be very careful—it looks to me, Madame, as if they would end by strangling her!"
Sylvia became very uncomfortable. "Of course she means my pearls," she whispered. "But how absurd to say they could ever do me harm."
"Look here," said Anna Wolsky earnestly, "you are quite right, Madame; my friend has a necklace which has already played a certain part in her life. But is it not just because of this fact that you feel the influence of this necklace so strongly? I entreat you to speak frankly. You are really distressing me very much!"
Madame Cagliostra looked very seriously at the speaker.
"Well, perhaps it is so," she said at last. "Of course, we are sometimes wrong in our premonitions. And I confess that I feel puzzled—exceedingly puzzled—to-day. I do not know that I have ever had so strange a case as that of this English lady before me! I see so many roads stretching before her—I also see her going along more than one road. As a rule, one does not see this in the cards."
She looked really harassed, really distressed, and was still conning her cards anxiously.
"And yet after all," she cried suddenly, "I may be wrong! Perhaps the necklace has less to do with it than I thought! I do not know whether the necklace would make any real difference! If she takes one of the roads open to her, then I see no danger at all attaching to the preservation of this necklace. But the other road leads straight to the House of Peril."
"The House of Peril?" echoed Sylvia Bailey.
"Yes, Madame. Do you not know that all men and women have their House of Peril—the house whose threshold they should never cross—behind whose door lies misery, sometimes dishonour?"
"Yes," said Anna Wolsky, "that is true, quite true! There has been, alas! more than one House of Peril in my life." She added, "But what kind of place is my friend's House of Peril?"
"It is not a large house," said the fortune-teller, staring down at the shining surface of her table. "It is a gay, delightful little place, ladies—quite my idea of a pretty dwelling. But it is filled with horror unutterable to Madame. Ah! I entreat you"—she stared sadly at Sylvia—"to beware of unknown buildings, especially if you persist in keeping and in wearing your necklace."
"Do tell us, Madame, something more about my friend's necklace. Is it, for instance, of great value, and is it its value that makes it a source of danger?"
Anna Wolsky wondered very much what would be the answer to this question. She had had her doubts as to the genuineness of the pearls her friend wore. Pearls are so exquisitely imitated nowadays, and these pearls, if genuine, were of such great value!
At first she had not believed them to be real, then gradually she had become convinced of Sylvia's good faith. If the pearls were false, Sylvia did not know it.
But Madame Cagliostra's answer was disappointing—or prudent.
"I cannot tell you that," she said. "I cannot even tell you of what the necklace is composed. It may be of gold, of silver, of diamonds, of pearls—it may be, I'm inclined to think it is, composed of Egyptian scarabei. They, as you know, often bring terrible ill-fortune in their train, especially when they have been taken from the bodies of mummies. But the necklace has already caused this lady to quarrel with a very good and sure friend of hers—of that I am sure. And, as I tell you, I see in the future that this necklace may cause her very serious trouble—indeed, I see it wound like a serpent round her neck, pressing ever tighter and tighter—"
She suddenly began shuffling the cards. "And now," she said in a tone of relief, "I will deal with you, Madame," and she turned to Anna with a smile.
Sylvia drew her chair a little away from the table.
She felt depressed and uncomfortable. What an odd queer kind of fortune had been told her! And then it had all been so muddled. She could scarcely remember what it was that had been told her.
Two things, however, remained very clear in her mind: The one was the absurd prediction that she might never go back to her own country; the second was all that extraordinary talk about her pearls. As to the promised lover, the memory of the soothsayer's words made her feel very angry. No doubt Frenchwomen liked that sort of innuendo, but it only disgusted her.
Yet it was really very strange that Madame Cagliostra had known, or rather had divined, that she possessed a necklace by which she laid great store. But wasn't