Not having had the experience of the gypsy tent, Betty awaited her turn with more interest than the others, and thrust her little brown hand through the opening, half afraid. She wondered what secrets it would tell Miss Allison, who, in addition to all the pleasant, complimentary things she had told, had added some very plain truths. Eugenia's hand, she said, showed its owner to be extravagant and wilful; Malcolm's, vain and overbearing; Keith's, disorderly; and Rob's, lacking in judgment.
Miss Allison held Betty's hand a moment, not certain to whom it belonged, although she might have guessed, considering how brown and hardened by work it was. "Too sensitive and too imaginative by far," she said. "But I like this little hand. It will always be faithful in little things as well as big, and will keep its promises to the utmost. It is a hand that can be trusted."
Betty's face shone. What Miss Allison had said pleased her more than the fortune which followed, although it foretold a long life full of as many interesting happenings as if she had Aladdin's wonderful lamp to use as she chose. She looked at her hand with a new interest after she had withdrawn it from the screen, and Keith found her studying it again after the fortune-telling was done, and the others had gone into the drawing-room.
Eugenia sat at the piano, Lloyd twanged on the harp, while Joyce tuned her mandolin and Malcolm his banjo. Rob lolled in an open window, listening, and beating time with both feet. Mrs. Sherman and Miss Allison were down at the far end of the wide porch, where the moonlight was stealing through the vines and shimmering on the floor.
It was on the porch steps that Keith found Betty looking at her hands again, as they lay spread out on her lap, and studying their lines by moonlight. He sat down beside her.
"How does your Aunt Allison know?" she asked, without looking up. "It seems like some sort of witches' work to me, the way she guessed things about the rest of you; and I suppose it's just as true what she said about me,—at least the part about being too sensitive and imaginative is true, I know. Cousin Hetty says I go about with my head in the clouds half the time. I would love to think that the other part is true, too. She said it in such a sweet solemn sort of a way, as if she laid some kind of a spell on my hand that was not to be broken. 'It will keep its promises to the utmost,' she said, and I feel that it will have to do it now, just because she said so."
"That is Aunt Allison's way," answered Keith. "Nobody knows how much she has helped Malcolm and me by giving us these, and expecting us to live up to them." He touched a little badge on the lapel of his coat, as he spoke. It was a tiny flower of white enamel, with a little diamond in the centre, like a drop of dew.
"What is that for?" asked Betty, curiously. "I have been wondering why you and your brother both wear them."
"Aunt Allison gave them to us. She calls us her two little knights, and this is the badge of our knighthood, 'wearing the white flower of a blameless life,' It began one time when we were out at grandmother's all winter. We gave a benefit for a little tramp, who came very near being burned to death in a cabin on the place. We had tableaux, you know, and Malcolm and I were knights in one of them."
"Oh, I know," interrupted Betty, eagerly. "I've seen your picture taken in that costume, and it is lovely."