"Ah," the Russian murmured, "here is something different."

With her eyelids pressed together, she began:

"You are sitting alone. You are writing letters, which will pass
through many hands of different colors. One would think that those
hands would grow warm from touching your letters. Now you are not
writing any more letters. You are wearing a black dress." Madame
Zanidov leaned forward as if striving with her closed eyes to pierce a
sudden opacity. "This is very odd," she declared. "I can see no more
pictures. For there is a darkness which grows larger and larger, which
obscures everything. So now I must discover what this darkness means.
Please be patient for a few moments."

Some one whispered:

"It's getting quite uncanny,"

Lilla's senses reached out to clench themselves upon the normality of
her surroundings. But beneath that normality, that familiar solidity,
her innate mysticism, her instinctive habit of foreboding, seemed to
perceive a basis invisible yet similar--a solution, so to speak, from
which material things and events were continually being evolved, the
fluid containing all the elements of the crystalization. And this
foreigner, with her idol-like face and meager, rigid body, her aspect
of long acquaintance with the very essence of materiality, became the
ageless oracle, the rewarder of humanity's incorrigible credulity. So,
like the bejeweled princesses in the Mesopotamian temples, the Latin
ladies who had crept trembling into the Aventine caves, the Renaissance
beauties who, in the huts of witches, had turned whiter than their
ruffs, Lilla remained motionless, her gaze fixed apprehensively on the
clairvoyant.

The latter said:

"It will soon be plainer, for the moon is rising. No, what a nuisance!
It is still very dark, because the moonlight is shut out by great
masses of foliage, great tangles of vines. Such a place! Gigantic
thickets, through which wild beasts are prowling, and above them the
trunks of huge trees. Wait, I have found a path. It leads to a
clearing in the midst of this forest. Here I can see much better.
There are human beings here, and a feeling of sadness."

At a general stir, one of the ladies suggested nervously:

"Perhaps you'd better----"

But Madame Zanidov was saying:

"The people in the clearing are black savages. They sit round a body
that is stretched on the ground and covered with a cloth. Is it the
savages who are so sad? I think n