“Dere is much pleasure for you, my pretty young lady,” said the prophetess, “and some pain to endure before the pleasure comes, but dere’s money and fame for you finally, and great prosperity and a long life wid somebody.”
“Why, there’s a mysterious somebody in every one’s hand, is there?” asked Lily. “I wonder who my somebody is.”
“A tall, fair man, wid a long mustache,” said the fortune teller, oracularly.
“Well,” said Lily, “you may keep that young man yourself, for of all things I hate tall, fair men. My papa is little and broad, and he’s my type of every thing good; and I wouldn’t marry a man who wasn’t just like him for the whole world.”
“O, Lily, do shut up!” whispered Edna. “You’ll make her angry, and then she wont finish.”
But madame seemed in no way disconcerted or offended by Lily’s trifling, and continued to promise her quite an extensive variety of experiences. Then Edna offered her hand with its too ample embellishment of rings, and madame gave them quite a little turn by the excitement she manifested on studying its interesting lines.
“A most wonderful hand, lady. I have never seen but one like it. It holds a destiny dat frightens me. Do I dare to tell you? Let me dink a moment.”
Here she grew so awful and mysterious in her manner, while she turned the hand one way and the other as if to get new light upon the doom there depicted, and the girls grew deeply absorbed in their attention, clustering close around her in forgetfulness of every thing else.
The air was heavy with the August noonday heat. Above in the grove the meeting branches hardly stirred. Even the birds and the insect world were still, and the only sound that broke upon the oppressive silence was the distant rush of water that fell over the little dam, half a mile away from them.
“I tinks I cannot tell you it all,” said the fortune-teller, raising her head and looking about her hurriedly. “Some young ladies when dey hears what is not good dey faints and goes on very bad, and deir friends makes a fuss and scolds de poor gypsy, who only tells what she reads; an’ it is not her fault if it is not good.”