"'What?' we cried in chorus, breaking the long-enforced silence.
"'It is the suicide line!'
"Poor little Timoroso jerked her hands away, and turned toward us with a frightened face gleaming through the dusk as white as her collar. Her distress was pitiful.
"You see, Elsie had been telling so many truths about us, that poor little Tim believed implicitly in her fortune-telling ability. She felt that her doom was sealed; that the cruel finger of a relentless fate had written it so plainly in her tell-tale palm, that all who saw it might read. She hid her face on my shoulder and sobbed so violently that it put an end to the seance.
"Elsie had to come out from behind the screen to help soothe her. 'Why, Tim, dear, you mustn't take it so to heart!' she insisted. 'Let me look at your hands again. There may be plenty of lines to counteract that one; besides, I am only a beginner, and liable to make a wrong interpretation.'
"By sheer force of her strong, cheery personality, she calmed Tim after awhile, and had her laughing like the gayest of us. Nobody but Elsie could have done it.
"When Miss Hill made an excuse to come in a little after nine o'clock, we were eating apples and telling riddles as demurely as Quaker ladies."
"'SHE HID HER FACE ON MY SHOULDER'"[ToList]