The Chink in the Armour | Page 6

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
country! 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 whispered. "But how absurd to say they could ever do me harm."
"Look here," said Anna Wolsky earnestly, "you are quite right,
Madame; my friend has a necklace which has already played a certain
part in her life. But is it not just because of this fact that you feel the
influence of this necklace so strongly? I entreat you to speak frankly.
You are really distressing me very much!"
Madame Cagliostra looked very seriously at the speaker.
"Well, perhaps it is so," she said at last. "Of course, we are sometimes
wrong