“I see a beeg, beeg city,” Sally intoned dreamily, her eyes again fixed upon the crystal. “I see you there, in beeg, beeg house. Much moneys. And behind you I see a man—your husband, no?”
“Yes, I am married,” Enid Barr laughed. “Since you see so much, suppose you tell me my name.”
“I see—” Sally frowned, but her heart was pounding at her audacity, “ze letter E and ze letter R—no, B! I see a beeg place—not your house—with ma-ny girls holding out zeir arms to you. You help zem. You are va-ry, va-ry good.”
“Rot!” Enid Barr laughed, but a bright flush of pleasure spread over her fair face. “One has to do something with ‘much moneys,’ doesn’t one? Listen, Princess Lalla, if that is really your name: prove to me you are a real crystal-gazer! Tell me something I’d give almost anything to know—” She leaned forward tensely, her violet-blue eyes darkening with excitement and appeal until they were almost the color of Sally’s.
“And what’s that, Enid?” a mocking, amused voice inquired. “Do you want to know whether I really love you? How can you ask! Of course I do!”
Enid Barr sprang to her feet so hastily that the camp stool on which she had been sitting overturned, anger and something like fear blazing in her eyes.
Enid Barr and Arthur Van Horne moved away from “Princess Lalla’s” platform together, Enid’s golden head held high, her lovely voice staccato with anger; but Sally, although she was guilty of trying to do so, could not distinguish a word that was being said.
Near the front exit of the tent Van Horne was greeted boisterously by a party of Capital City society men and women, laden with trophies from the gambling concessions on the midway. He was swept into the party, which Enid Barr refused to join, shaking her little golden head stubbornly and pretending a great interest in the midget, “Pitty Sing,” whose platform was nearest the exit.
Although Sally was at liberty to leave the tent until the final performance at eleven o’clock, she sat on in her throne-like chair, hoping and yet fearing that the beautiful woman would return and ask her the question which Van Horne’s unwelcome interruption had left unspoken.
Enid spoke to “Pitty Sing” in her proud, offhand manner, paid a dollar for one of the midget’s cheap little postcard pictures of herself, refused to take the change and was turning toward Sally’s platform again when Winfield Bybee entered the tent with Gus, the barker.