y! Stop--or, perhaps, I shall say too much! Still if you ever do go
back, it will be as a stranger. That I say with certainty. And I add that
I hope with all my heart that you will live to go back to your own
country, Madame!"

Sylvia felt a vague, uneasy feeling of oppression, almost of fear, steal
over her. It seemed to her that Madame Cagliostra was looking at her with
puzzled, pitying eyes.

The soothsayer again put a fat and not too clean finger down on the
upturned face of a card.

"There is something here I do not understand; something which I miss when
I look at you as I am now looking at you. It is something you always
wear--"

She gazed searchingly at Sylvia, and her eyes travelled over Mrs.
Bailey's neck and bosom.

"I see them and yet they are not there! They appear like little balls of
light. Surely it is a necklace?"

Sylvia looked extremely surprised. Now, at last, Madame Cagliostra was
justifying her claim to a supernatural gift!

"These balls of light are also your Fate!" exclaimed the woman
impetuously. "If you had them here--I care not what they be--I should
entreat you to give them to me to throw away."

Madame Wolsky began to laugh. "I don't think you would do that," she
observed drily.

But Madame Cagliostra did not seem to hear the interruption.

"Have you heard of a mascot?" she said abruptly. "Of a mascot which
brings good fortune to its wearer?"

Sylvia bent her head. Of course she had heard of mascots.

"Well, if so, you have, of course, heard of objects which bring
misfortune to their wearers--which are, so to speak, unlucky mascots?"

And this time it was Anna Wolsky who, leaning forward, nodded gravely.
She attributed a run of bad luck she had had the year before to a
trifling gift, twin cherries made of enamel, which a friend had given
her, in her old home, on her birthday. Till she had thrown that little
brooch into the sea, she had been persistently unlucky at play.

"Your friend," murmured Madame Cagliostra, now addressing herself to
Anna and not to Sylvia, "should dispossess herself as quickly as possible
of her necklace, of these round balls. They have already brought her
ill-fortune in the past, they have lowered her in the estimation of an
estimable person--in fact, if she is not very careful, indeed, even if
she be very careful--it looks to me, Madame, as if they would end by
strangling her!"

Sylvia became very uncomfortable. "Of course she means my pearls," she