“Oh, don’t go on,” cried Anna, in terrible confusion as she heard all this, and caught Tod’s eye, and saw Bill on the broad laugh. “Don’t, pray don’t; it must be all nonsense,” she went on, blushing redder than a rose.
“But it’s true,” steadily urged the old lady. “There the wedding is. I don’t say it’ll be soon; perhaps not for some years; but come it will in its proper time. And you’ll live in a fine big house; and—stay a bit—you’ll——”
Anna, half laughing, half crying, pushed the cards together. “I won’t be told any more,” she said; “it must be all a pack of nonsense.”
“Of course it is,” added Helen decisively. “And why couldn’t you have told me all that, Mrs. Ness?”
“Why, my dear, sweet young lady, it isn’t me that tells; it’s the cards.”
“I don’t believe it. But it does to while away a wet and wretched afternoon. Now, Miss Carey.”
Miss Carey looked up from her book with a start. “Oh, not me! Please, not me!”
“Not you!—the idea!” cried Helen. “Why, of course you must. I and my sister have had our turn, and you must take yours.”
As if further objection were out of the question, Miss Carey stood timidly up by the table and shuffled the cards that Dame Ness handed to her. When they were spread out, the old woman looked at the cards longer than she had looked for either Helen or Anna, then at the girl, then at the cards again.
“There has been sickness and trouble;—and distress,” she said at length, “And—and—’tain’t over yet. I see a dark lady and a fair man: they’ve been in it, somehow. Seems to ha’ been a great trouble”—putting the tips of her forefingers upon two cards. “Here you are, you see, right among it,”—pointing to the Queen of Hearts. “I don’t like the look of it. And there’s money mixed up in the sorrow——”