“Are you a fraud?” and Avice suddenly stooped and looked into the woman’s eyes, taking her off her guard.
“No,” she replied so simply and calmly that for the first time Avice believed she was not.
“No, I am no fraud. I tell you truly, if you go to Isis, she will tell you. If you do not, you will never know, and,”—she paused, “you will regret it all your life.”
The last words, spoken in an emphatic and impressive manner, were accompanied by a nod of the head, and the speaker moved toward the door. “That is all,” she said, as she paused on the threshold, “I have told you. You may do as you choose, but it will be an eternal regret if you fail to do my bidding.”
She was gone, and Avice, bewildered, sat quiet for a moment. “How absurd,” she thought, as soon as she could think coherently at all. “Fancy my going to a clairvoyant, or seer or whatever she called her! And anyway, I don’t know where the Isis person is.”
Then, chancing to look down at the table near her, she saw a card lying there. Immediately she knew what it was and that the woman had left it. She picked it up, and saw the address of a palmist and fortune-teller in Longacre Square.
“I’ll never go there,” she said to herself, but she put the card away in a book.
It was after only two or three brown studies over the queerness of the thing that she started for the address given. She had a subconsciousness that she had known all along that she would go, but she had to persuade herself first. That she had done, almost without knowing it, and now she was on her way. She had told no one, for she hadn’t even yet acknowledged to herself that she would go in, only that she would go and look at the place.
It was in an office building, unpretentious and altogether ordinary. She went up in the elevator and looked at the door that bore the given number. And in another moment she was inside.
It was the usual sort of place, decently furnished, but commonplace of atmosphere and appointments. There was no attempt at an air of mystery, no velvet hangings or deep alcoves. The room was light and cheerful. As Avice waited, a young woman came in. She wore a trailing robe and her pale gray eyes had a mystic far-seeing gaze.