Although Mère Gontran was puffing at her soup as if nothing had happened, the house had changed, or rather it had not changed so much as revealed itself in a brief instant. All that there was of queerness in this tumble-down pension became endowed with deliberate meaning, and it was no longer possible to ascribe the atmosphere to the effect of weakened nerves upon a weakened body. Sylvia began to wonder if the form her delirium had taken had not been directly due to this atmosphere; more than ever she was inclined to attach a profound significance to her delirium and perceive in it the diabolic revelation with which it had originally been fraught.
When after dinner Mère Gontran took a pack of cards and began to tell her fortune, Sylvia had a new impulse to dread; but she shook it off almost irritably and listened to the tale.
"A long journey by land. A long journey by sea. A dark man. A fair woman. A fair man. A dark woman. A letter."
The familiar rigmarole of a hundred such tellings droned its course, accompanied by the flip-flap, flip-flap of the cards. The information was general enough for any human being on earth to have extracted from it something applicable to himself; yet, against her will, and as it were bewitched by the teller's solemnity, Sylvia began to endow the cards with the personalities that might affect her life. The King of Hearts lost his rubicund complacency and took on the lineaments of Arthur: the King of Clubs parted with his fierceness and assumed the graceful severity of Michael Fane: with a kind of impassioned egotism Sylvia watched the journeyings of the Queen of Hearts, noting the contacts and biting her lips when she found her prototype associated with unfavorable cards.
"Come, I don't think the outlook's so bad," said Mère Gontran at the end of the final disposition. "If your bed's a bit doubtful, your street and your house are both very good, and your road lies south. But there again, this blessed war upsets everything, and even the cards must be read with half an eye on the war."
When the cards had been put away, Mère Gontran produced the planchette and set it upon a small table covered in red baize round the binding of which hung numerous little woolen pompons.
"Now we shall find out something about your friends in England," she announced, cheerfully.
Sylvia had not the heart to disappoint Mère Gontran, and she placed her hands upon the heart-shaped board, which trembled so much under Mère Gontran's eager touch that the pencil affixed made small squiggles upon the paper beneath. The planchette went on fidgeting more and more under their four hands like a restless animal trying to escape, and from time to time it would skate right across the paper, leaving a long penciled trail in its path, which Mère Gontran would examine with great intentness.
"It looks a little bit like a Y," she would say.
"A very little bit," Sylvia would think.