Unless," she concluded slowly, "there is no serious reason why
he should not know the truth--now?"

Vanderlyn also got up. A look of profound astonishment came over his
face.

"The truth?" he repeated. "But surely, Madame de Lera, it is impossible
that this woman whom Pargeter is going to consult to-morrow morning can
have any clue to the truth! Surely you do not seriously believe----" he
did not conclude his sentence. That this broad-minded and religious
Frenchwoman could possibly cherish any belief in the type of charlatan
to which the American diplomatist supposed the famous Paris
fortune-teller to belong was incredible to him.

"I beg of you most earnestly," she repeated, in a deeply troubled voice,
"to prevent any meeting between Mr. Pargeter and Madame d'Elphis!
Believe me, I do not speak without reason; I know more of this
soothsayer and her mysterious powers than you can possibly know----"

"Do you mean me to understand that you yourself would ever consult such
an oracle?" Vanderlyn could not keep a certain contemptuous incredulity
out of his voice.

"No, indeed! But then I, unlike you, believe this woman's traffic to be
of the devil. Listen, Mr. Vanderlyn, and I will tell you of a case in
which La d'Elphis was closely concerned--a case of which I have absolute
knowledge."

Madame de Lera went back to her chair; she sank into it, and, with
Vanderlyn standing before her, she told him the story.

"If you cast back your mind to the time when you were first in Paris,
you will probably recall my husband's niece, a beautiful girl named
Jeanne de Lera?" Vanderlyn bent his head without speaking; nay more, a
look of pain came over his tired face, and sunken eyes, for, strangely
enough, there was a certain sinister parallel between the fate which had
befallen the charming girl whose image was thus suddenly brought up
before him, and that of the beloved woman who seemed to be now even more
present to his emotional memory than she had been in life.

"As you know, for it was no secret, Jeanne had what English and American
people call 'flirted' with Henri Delavigne, and he had sworn that he
would kill himself on her wedding-day. Well, the poor foolish girl took
this threat very seriously; it shadowed her happy betrothal, and on the
very day before her marriage was to take place, she persuaded her
married sister to go with her to a fortune-teller. It was not her own
future, which stretched cloudless and radiant befor