“Oh—how lovely,” breathed she in ecstatic surprise, and then suddenly her face clouded. “We forgot to send him a thing,” she reminded contritely.
“Never mind,” comforted Katherine, “we’ll go to the clairvoyant and help get his grandson back for him and I guess that will mean more to him than any little set of cuff links or knitted tie we might have given him.”
“So we will,” mused Peggy, “do you think we could go to-morrow?”
Not the morrow, but the day before New Year’s finally saw Katherine’s family persuaded to let the two girls go to Madame Blakey, who had really a considerable reputation in the town for correctly reading futures in her glass of water. Not that Katherine’s father and mother believed in that sort of thing, but they actually knew people who seemed to, and they could see no harm in permitting the girls to go. But when the two daring experimenters with things yet to come had been conveyed by James, the chauffeur, in their big touring car to the residence of Madame, they found all the blinds closed and no sign of life about the place anywhere. A woman from next door told them that Madame Blakey had gone away on her vacation to visit relatives.
“Well,” sighed Katherine in miserable disappointment, “I suppose other people have to have vacations too. But it does seem heartbreaking that all our plans should be spoiled and poor Mr. Huntington should never find his grandson, after all.”
“Yes,” agreed Peggy, brushing away the baffled tears, “isn’t there somebody else in town who—who sees things ahead?”
“Oh,” objected Katherine, “not that mother would let us go to—but listen, we might go first and then explain all about it and she’d understand our motive. Let’s look in the personals of the newspaper. Sometimes there is one advertised there.”
So they sent James for a paper and eagerly scanned its columns until they found in inviting, bold type, “Madame La Mar, palmist and clairvoyant. I read the future: I tell your past: consult me about your business or your heart affairs.”
“Ah,” cried Katherine, and she read the address to James, while she squeezed Peggy’s hand under the heavy robe.
A few minutes later the machine had drawn up before a frowsy little apartment building, very different from and far less prepossessing than the neat, newly painted little house of Madame Blakey’s.