“Cannot you tell it?—have your powers of forecasting inconveniently run away?” said she incautiously, her tone mocking in her disappointment.
“I could tell it, all too surely; but you might not like to hear it,” returned he.
“Our magician has lost his divining-rod just when he needed it,” observed a gentleman with a grey beard, a stranger to me, who was standing opposite, speaking in a tone of ill-natured satire; and a laugh went round.
“It is not that,” said the signor, keeping his temper perfectly. “I could tell what the cards say, all too certainly; but it would not give satisfaction.”
“Oh yes, it would,” returned Nancy. “I should like to hear it, every bit of it. Please do begin.”
“The cards are dark, very dark indeed,” he said; “I don’t remember ever to have seen them like it. Each time they have been turned the darkness has increased. Nothing can show worse than they do now.”
“Never mind that,” gaily returned Ann. “You undertook to tell my fortune, sir; and you ought not to make excuses in the middle of it. Let the cards be as dark as night, we must hear what they say.”
He drew in his thin lips for a moment, and then spoke, his tone quiet, calm, unemotional.
“Some great evil threatens you,” he began; “you seem to be living in the midst of it. It is not only you that it threatens; there is another also——”