"Can you invent no other rhymes?" exclaimed D'Alvimar. "Your vocabulary is not rich!"
"Everyone is not rich who wishes to be, messire," rejoined the gypsy; "and yet there are those who wish it very earnestly, so earnestly that they do everything to obtain wealth, even at the risk of the axe and the halter!"
"Do you read such things in this gentleman's destiny?" said Lauriane, who had been deeply impressed by the conjurer's warning to herself, and now strove to turn the whole affair into a jest.
"Perhaps!" said Monsieur d'Alvimar carelessly; "one never knows what may happen."
"But one can find out!" cried La Flèche. "Come who wants to know?"
"No one," said the marquis, "no one, if there is anything unpleasant in store for any of us."
"Well, neighbor, you have faith, on my word!" said De Beuvre, who did not exactly believe in anything. "You are an excellent customer for any mountebank who chooses to fill your ears with idle tales!"
"As you please," rejoined Bois-Doré, "but I cannot help it. I have seen such surprising things! A score of times things that have been predicted have happened to me."
"How can you believe that an ignorant idiot like this fellow can look into the future, of which God alone knows the secrets?" said D'Alvimar.
"I do not believe in the knowledge of the operator himself," replied Bois-Doré, "except in so far as, by long practice, he knows how to compute numbers, and those numbers are to him like letters in a book whereof the peculiar quality of numbers composes words and phrases."