"The Sybil?" repeated Mrs. Franklyn-Haldene.
"Yes. A new fortune-teller, and everybody says she's a wonder. I haven't been to her yet, but I'm goin' just as soon as I get time."
"Do you believe they know what they are talking about?" incredulously.
"Know! I should say I did. Old Mother Danforth has told me lots of things that have come true. She was the one who predicted the Spanish war and the president's assassination. It is marvelous, but she done it."
Mrs. Franklyn-Haldene shuddered. With all her faults, she loved the English language.
"How do you want your hair fixed?" Madame inquired, seeing that her patron's interest in mediums was not strong.
"The same as usual. Last week you left a streak, and I am sure everybody noticed it at the Gordon tea. Be careful to-day."
Thereupon Mrs. Franklyn-Haldene constituted herself a martyr to the cause. She was nervous and fidgety in the chair, for the picture of that letter on the sidewalk kept recurring. In the meantime Madame told her all that had happened and all that hadn't, which is equally valuable. The toilet lasted an hour; and when Mrs. Franklyn-Haldene rose from the chair, Madame was as dry as a brook in August. Her patron hurried to the street. The letter was still on the sidewalk. Mrs. Franklyn-Haldene picked it up and quickly sought her carriage. Pah! how the thing smelt of sachet-powder. Her aristocratic nose wrinkled in disdain. But her curiosity surmounted her natural repugnance. The address was written in a coarse masculine hand. The carriage had gone two blocks before she found the necessary courage to open the letter. The envelope had already been opened, so in reading it her conscience suggested nothing criminal.
Gossip began on the day Eve entered the Garden of Eden. To be sure, there was little to gossip about, but that little Eve managed without difficulty to collect. It is but human to take a harmless interest in what our next-door neighbor is doing, has done, or may do. Primarily gossip was harmless; to-day it is still harmless in some quarters. The gossip of the present time is like the prude, always looking for the worst and finding it. The real trouble with the gossip lies in the fact that she has little else to do; her own affairs are so uninteresting that she is perforce obliged to look into the affairs of her neighbors. Then, to prove that she is well informed, she feels compelled to repeat what she has seen or heard, more or less accurately. From gossiping to meddling is but a trifling step. To back up a bit of gossip, one often meddles. Mrs. Franklyn-Haldene was naturally a daughter of Eve; she was more than a gossip, she was a prophetess. She foretold scandal. She would move Heaven and earth, so the saying goes, to prove her gossip infallible. And when some prophecy of hers went wrong, she did everything in her power to right it. To have acquired the reputation of prophesying is one thing, always to fulfil these prophecies is another. It never occurred to her that she was destroying other people's peace of mind, that she was constituting herself a Fate, that she was meddling with lives which in no wise crossed or interfered with her own. She had no real enmity either for Warrington or Mrs. Jack; simply, she had prophesied that Warrington had taken up his residence in Herculaneum in order to be near Katherine Challoner, John Bennington's wife. Here was a year nearly gone, and the smoke of the prophecy had evaporated, showing that there had been no fire below.
Neither Warrington nor Mrs. Jack was in her thoughts when she opened the letter, which was signed by McQuade's familiar appellation.