Page:Belloc Lowndes--The chink in the armour.djvu/26

16 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"