“Now, where have I heard that voice before, and that old saw in the same tone? It is strangely familiar, somehow, with a difference that baffles one!”
He heard Berry murmur again sobbingly:
“Forgive me, I did not mean any harm. Have you brought the charm with you?”
Then indeed Charley Bonair could scarcely keep from betraying himself by laughing outright.
“I left it around the path there in my bundle. Come with me and you shall have it.”
“I thank you,” Berry answered, simply and sweetly, and moved away by her side, a slim, white, girlish figure by the tall, grotesque figure of the other.
Bonair started to follow, then drew quickly back.
“It is none of my business to go spying on the dear, silly little girl,” he decided. “She must be in love with some other fellow now, by her anxiety over the old fortune teller, who knows no more of her future than the man in the moon. I’d better go back to the house and announce myself, and done with it! Hello, I’ll finish my cigar and drop around to my zoo, and see Zilla first. They wrote me she had two cubs and was savage as a lioness!”
He sauntered along in the moonlight when the cigar was lighted; but suddenly his repose was shaken by a terrible sound—loud, piercing shrieks coming from the direction of the zoo.