“Yes, yes, I’m sure,” pacified Peggy. “And now suppose you tell us something. It’s what we came for.”
“With the crystal,” Katherine put in, “and maybe our palms too.”
“No, not our palms,” cried Peggy in consternation, looking at the rather dirty red hands of the husky fortune teller. “I think the crystal alone is best.”
“Well, then.” The red hands caught up a little crystal globe that was lying on the table. “All look into this with me, just as hard as you can,” she urged, “and think with all your might about the question you want me to solve for you, and pretty soon I’ll see things come in here and that will be the future.”
The room settled down to a curious, stifling, nerve-racking silence while the prophetess gazed into her gleaming crystal.
She was breathing hard, and after a time it seemed to the two girls that a faint film or cloud went across the glassy brightness of the little globe, and this filminess took vague shape and disappeared.
Each girl thought as hard as she could. “How can we find Mr. Huntington’s grandson for him? Where is he now?”
Finally, in a sepulchral voice, startlingly different from her own, the woman began to speak: “I see a girl,” she murmured.
This beginning was so far from promising and so utterly different from what they had someway expected that Katherine burst out into hysterical laughter. “She could see two of ’em if she looked very hard,” she chortled too audibly in her friend’s ear.
“There, you’ve broken the spell,” complained the woman peevishly. “How can you expect me to find the future for a pack of laughing hyenas that don’t believe what I’m telling them, anyway?”