“We all are—you goose. That’s why we are risking our reports.”
A few minutes later the girls were crowded into a dingy little room where Madame Shebad had arranged to tell their fortunes.
It was, of course, Jean’s idea, for Glenwood was rather dull for a girl who had been accustomed to the city life that Jean Faval left to “finish up” at a fashionable school. Only a musty curtain divided the parts of the fortune teller’s cabin, and, one at a time of course, the girls were to go behind this and get dizzy, gazing into the big, glass ball, made in an Ohio glass factory, but supposed to come from some other mysterious place, not on the maps of this good government.
“You go first,” begged a girl who was really first in line.
“Come in proper turns, please,” said a voice from inside the curtain, and the timid one started.
“Let me have your hand,” commanded the same, lazy voice.
The hand trembled visibly, and the fortune teller was clever enough to say that the girl had a very nervous temperament!
“But you are talented,” she added shrewdly, “and you will get on in life. I see you on a ship—you are going on a long journey, and when you return you will be strong and well.”
So she went on, while Tillie (for it was she) shook more every moment, not alone because of the strained position she sat in, with her hand in that of the woman’s, and her eyes glued to the ball, but because she was worrying about getting back to school.
Several other girls went through the same sing-song fortune telling with the slight variations of letters coming, and light and dark friends of different grades and different shades.