Henderson.

"Any success?" asked Felicity.

"She saw some horses in the crystal. But as she didn't know their names,
it was no earthly use to me. Says I'll back the winner for a place,
though. She's got second-rate sight--second sight, I mean."

"A great many of these old Highland families have," said Felicity
seriously, to please Vera.

"Have they, though? She says she's half Irish," said Henderson, with his
characteristic puzzled look. "She's been telling my character
too--reading between the lines, you know, the lines on my hand. She
doesn't seem to think much of me, Mrs. Ogilvie." He laughed again.

"As soon as she's had some tea," said Vera, ringing, "you must go in,
Felicity. We mustn't tire her. It's frightfully exhausting work."

"Must be," assented Bob.

"It takes it out of her ever so much more with some people than with
others," said Vera.

"Ah, it would," said Bob solemnly, shaking his head.

"I suppose complicated people are more wearing than the simpler kind,"
said Felicity. "There's more in them to find out."

"You mean it must have been pretty plain sailing with me?" said
Henderson.

Here Wilton arrived.

"There's something about the tone of your delightful home to-day," he
said as he greeted Vera, "that makes me feel curiously Oriental. I don't
exactly know what it is, but I feel I want to sit down cross-legged on
a mat and smoke a hookah. How do you account for it?"

"You 'hear the East a-calling,' and all that sort of thing," said
Henderson, laughing. "Eh?"

"Yes. But perhaps after all it's only the east wind. No, it's the
incense some one's been burning. At your shrine, of course, Mrs.
Ogilvie. What a talent you have for creating the right atmosphere."

Vera was highly flattered.

"And now I think you might go in, Felicity," she said.

* * * * *

Felicity found a young girl with bright pleasant eyes, seated in front
of a little yellow table. She had a magnifying-glass on one side of her
and a crystal ball on the other. She was very neatly dressed in the
tailor-made style, and had no superfluous decorations of any kind.
Anything less like a sibyl could not be easily imagined.

Felicity took off her glove and placed her hand on a yellow cushion. As
she did so, she remembered charming things that Chetwode had said about
her hands, how he had compared them to white flowers; and she sighed....

"You're vurry sensitive indeed," said the palmist, with