The fair opened in the afternoon at two o’clock, so there was, of course, no school that afternoon. The long light basement looked very fine when the first visitors came down the stairs—there were rows of booths on each side of the hall, and each booth was in charge of a class room. All the pupils were supposed to take turns helping, so that each child would have some time to go around and see the other booths.
The teachers were on hand to make change and wrap parcels and answer questions, but the boys and girls were supposed to do most of the selling. And every one of them had customers, because if no one else came to buy, a mother or a daddy or an uncle or aunt would be sure to step up smilingly and say, “How much is that? I believe I’ll take it.”
At one end of the room was a tent, and five minutes after the fair had opened, the news was all over the basement that there was a fortune-teller in the tent.
“She’s tall and dark,” reported one of the teachers, “and she sits on a throne—I wonder who built the throne? They must have worked on it nights when no one was in the building.”
“The fortune-teller has an assistant,” Flora Gabrie told Roger Calendar. “I peeked in the tent. I’m sure I never saw her before. I never saw the fortune-teller, either. They must be from out of town.”
It cost ten cents to have one’s fortune told and it seemed as though everyone was anxious to find out what was “going to happen” as Flora Gabrie said with a little shiver. Flora said she didn’t believe that anyone could tell what was going to happen, but just the same she took ten cents of the money she had saved for Christmas, and gave it to the gypsy princess.
Whatever the princess—who was tall and dark, and who might or might not have been pretty, for she was so wrapped up in veils that no one could see her face—told the people who came into her tent, it made them happy. Most of them laughed and laughed and just to hear them laughing in the tent made those outside who were waiting their turns, the more anxious to go in. All afternoon there was a line of people going and coming from the fortune-teller’s tent.
“I’m going, too,” Catherine Gould suddenly decided.
She had been spending all her money at the grab-bag table, for she liked the shells and stamps that Uncle Hiram had given Roger. She was rather greedy about them and might have opened some of the packages before she bought them, if Miss Owen had not kept an eye on her. But Catherine still had ten cents left and she meant to spend this to have her fortune told.
She had to stand in line for several minutes and then her turn came. The attendant, who was short, and wrapped in veils, too, opened the flap of the tent and led Catherine inside.