h now and again she touched with
a fat finger, and without looking at Sylvia, she said:

"Madame has led a very placid, quiet life. Her existence has been a boat
that has always lain in harbour--" She suddenly looked up: "I spent my
childhood at Dieppe, and that often suggests images to me," she observed
complacently, and then she went on in quite another tone of voice:--

"To return to Madame and her fate! The boat has always been in harbour,
but now it is about to put out to sea. It will meet there another craft.
This other craft is, to Madame, a foreign craft, and I grieve to say it,
rather battered. But its timbers are sound, and that is well, for it
looks to me as if the sails of Madame's boat would mingle, at any rate
for a time with this battered craft."

"I don't understand what she means," said Sylvia, in a whisper. "Do ask
her to explain, Anna!"

"My friend asks you to drop metaphor," said the older woman, drily.

The soothsayer fixed her bright, beady little eyes on Sylvia's flushed
face.

"Well," she said deliberately, "I see you falling in love, and I also see
that falling in love is quite a new experience. It burns, it scorches
you, does love, Madame. And for awhile you do not know what it means, for
love has never yet touched you with his red-hot finger."

"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
countr