Vaughan almost jumped.
“By Jove!—you are an uncanny fellow!” he exclaimed.—“However, as it happens, you are right. I’m engaged to Miss Chester.”
“It is no surprise to me, but pray allow me to congratulate you!” and El-Râmi smiled.—“You have lost no time about it, I must say! It is only a fortnight since you first saw the lady at the theatre. Well!—confess me a true prophet!”
Sir Frederick looked uncomfortable, and was about to enter into an argument concerning the pros and cons of prophetic insight, when Lady Melthorpe suddenly emerged from the circling whirlpool of her fashionable guests and sailed towards them with a swan-like grace and languor.
“I cannot find the dear Baroness,” she said plaintively. “She is so much in demand! Do you know, my dear El-Râmi, she is really almost as wonderful as you are! Not quite—oh, not quite, but nearly! She can tell you all your past and future by the lines of your hand, in the most astonishing manner! Can you do that also?”
El-Râmi laughed.
“It is a gipsy’s trick,” he said,—“and the bonâ-fide gipsies who practise it in country lanes for the satisfaction of servant girls get arrested by the police for ‘fortune-telling.’ The gipsies of the London drawing-rooms escape scot-free.”
“Oh, you are severe!” said Lady Melthorpe, shaking her finger at him with an attempt at archness—“You are really very severe! You must not be hard on our little amusements,—you know, in this age, we are all so very much interested in the supernatural!”
El-Râmi grew paler, and a slight shudder shook his frame. The supernatural! How lightly people talked of that awful Something, that like a formless Shadow waits behind the portals of the grave!—that Something that evinced itself, suggested itself, nay, almost declared itself, in spite of his own doubts, in the momentary contact of a hand with his own, as in the case of Irene Vassilius. For in that contact he had received a faint, yet decided thrill through his nerves—a peculiar sensation which he recognised as a warning of something spiritually above himself,—and this had compelled him to speak of an “elsewhere” for her, though for himself he persisted in nourishing the doubt that an “elsewhere” existed. Roy Ainsworth, the artist, observing him closely, noted how stern and almost melancholy was the expression of his handsome dark face,—then glancing from him to his brother, was surprised at the marked difference between the two. The frank, open, beautiful features of Féraz seemed to invite confidence, and, acting on the suggestion made to him by Madame Vassilius, he spoke abruptly.
“I wish you would sit to me,” he said.