Page:Weird Tales Volume 9 Number 5 (1927-05).djvu/30

 reformation on Ben's part, after he's been attentive to me for several days. As long as he's indifferent to me she stays away, but each time he begins to be his old, dear self, she makes her appearance, always very late at night or early in the morning, and always with the same command for me to leave.

"One thing more, Doctor. The last time she told me to go—the time she threatened me—I noticed Ben's seal ring on her finger."

"Eh, what is that?" de Grandin snapped. "His ring? How?"

"He lost his ring when we went to visit Madame Naira. I'm sure he did, though he declares he didn't. It was a class ring with the seal of the university on it and his class numerals imposed on the seal."

"And how came he to lose it, if you please?"

"He was clowning," the girl answered. "Ben was always acting like a comedian in the old days, and he was showing off when we went to the Veiled Prophetess' that day. Really, I think the place rather impressed him and he was like a little boy whistling his way past the graveyard when he acted like a buffoon. The place was awfully weird, with a lot of Eastern bric-a-brac in the reception room where we wraited for the Prophetess to see us. Ben went all around, examining everything, and seemed especially taken with the statue of a woman with a cat's head. The thing was almost life-size, and shaped something like a mummy—it gave me the creeps, really. Ben put his hat—he was wearing a derby that day—on its head, and then slipped his seal ring on its finger. Just then the door to the Prophetess' consulting room opened, and Ben snatched his hat off the thing's head in a hurry, but I'm sure he didn't get his ring back. We were ushered into the fortune-teller's place immediately, and went out by another door, and we were so full of the stuff she'd told us that neither of us missed the ring till we were on the train coming home.

"Ben 'phoned her place next day, but they said no such ring had been found. He didn't like to confess he'd put it on the statue's finger, so he told them he must have dropped it on the floor."

"Ah?" de Grandin drew a pad of paper and a pencil toward him and scribbled a note. "And what did she tell you, this Madame Veiled Prophetess Naira, if you please, Madame?"

"Oh"—the girl spread her hands—"the usual patter the fortune-tellers have. Recited my history fairly accurately, told me I'd been to Egypt—nothing wonderful in that; I was wearing a scarab Ben bought me in Cairo—and ended up with some nonsense about my having to make a big sacrifice in the near future that others might have happiness and destiny be fulfilled."

She paused, a rosy flush suffusing her face. "That frightened us a little," she confessed, "because, when she said that, we both thought maybe she meant I was going to die when—well, you see"

"Perfectly, Madame," de Grandin nodded with quick understanding. "Mankind is perpetuated by woman's going into the Valley of the Shadow of Death to fetch up new lives. Fear not, dear lady, I do assure you the Prophetess meant something quite otherwise."

"And you will help me?" she begged. "Dr. de Grandin, I—I am going to do what you said about the Valley of the Shadow this spring, and I want my husband. He is my man, my mate, and no one—no thing—shall take him from me. Can you make her go away? Please?"

"I shall try, Madame," the little Frenchman answered gently. "I can not say I quite understand every-