. She lit a small red lamp and sat down before a little
bamboo table. A toy angel from a Christmas tree hung above her. A
stuffed alligator sat up, on its hind legs, beside her--a porcelain bell
hung on a red ribbon about its neck--to grin with a cheerful uncanniness
on the rigmaroles of magic.

She said: "Come!"

Mrs. Byrne entered the gipsy tent, and Mrs. Cregan was left alone in the
atmosphere of a bespangled past reduced to its lowest terms of
imposture. There were strings of Indian corn hanging from the ceiling,
Chinese coins and rabbits' feet on the walls, a horseshoe wrapped in
tinfoil over the door, and a collection of absurdly grotesque
bric-a-brac on shelves and tables. There were necklaces of lucky beads
for sale, and love charms in the shape of small glass hearts enclosing
imitation shamrocks, and dream books and manuals of palmistry and gipsy
cards for fortune-telling, and photographs of Madame Wampa in a gorgeous
evening dress trimmed with feathers. Over all was a smoky odor of
kerosene from an oil heater.

Mrs. Cregan looked from side to side with a vaguely worried feeling that
it must take a power of dusting and wiping to keep such a clutter of
things clean; and this feeling gradually rose into her consciousness
above the dull stupefaction of her grief.

Madame Wampa, in the chintz tent, recited without expression: "Though
you travel east or west, may your luck be the best." She dropped her
voice to a toneless mutter about a "journey," and some papers that were
to be signed, and a "false" dark woman who pretended to be Mrs. Byrne's
friend, but would do her an injury.

Mrs. Cregan sat as if she were waiting for her turn to enter a
confessional, her hands folded, her head dropped. She heard Mrs. Byrne
whispering hoarsely, but she did not listen.

Madame Wampa said, at last, wearily: "Very well. Send her in."

She shuffled her cards and sighed. She was professionally acquainted
with many griefs, and she took her toll of them. They meant no more to
her than sickness does to a quack. She looked up at Mrs. Cregan's
entrance almost absent-mindedly.

But there was, at once, something so helplessly stricken about the
woman's plump despair, so infantile, so touchingly ridiculous, that
Madame Wampa even smiled faintly and moved the bamboo table to let Mrs.
Cregan squeeze into the chair that waited her. She sat down and held out
her money in her palm. Madame Wampa took her hand. "I will tell you,"
she said