"To your house: there is love and good times, lots of fun making. You'll both still be laughing and taking fun out of it no matter what comes. It is all good, good!" She was kneeling at Augusta's side now. There was none of the air of mystery of the professional card reader. She had forgotten that she was giving Augusta a lesson. She was poring eagerly over the cards reading them swiftly as they came up to her, with all of a child's abandon in a game.
"To yourself: there is shortness of money. You will be worried about money, not right away, maybe, but some time before very long. And a horse, a horse will be in a part of the worry.
"To the one you love best: a dark—!" She stopped and turned about with a swift, tigerish twist of her lithe body. Wardwell, who had been gangling about, amused, and yet feeling somewhat left out of the picture, suddenly found himself pierced by the angriest pair of blue eyes he had ever seen. He did not know what it was about. But from the look the girl gave him he would not have been surprised if she had leapt upon him and buried claws in him.
"What—what is it?" Augusta asked wonderingly.
"Nothing," said the gypsy girl shortly. And she turned back to the cards.
"What you do expect: there is sickness and long journeying, and black and white all mixed together.
"What you do not expect: deceit. Deceit will break your life." Again the girl turned sharply to eye Wardwell. Evidently he stood the scrutiny well, for she turned back and said quite gently:
"I mustn't do this. You didn't ask me. And you didn't pay me. And I'm only giving you a lesson, anyway. Now just watch and listen." She mixed the cards all up together and began pulling out combinations at random, reading them in hasty rhymes as she showed them to Augusta.
"Back to back says speedy meeting—Three eights, change of states—Two jacks and a king, a constable bring—Two kings and a jack, an old friend back—" And so on through twenty flying combinations, while Augusta watched the quick brown fingers and listened to the broken rhyming, fascinated, yet feeling that she would very much rather not touch the cards at all. She knew, of course, that she would never think of using them in the way the gypsy girl had suggested. Nevertheless, she was afraid of them. She was sharply conscious that the girl had stopped telling what she saw in the reading because she had thought that she saw something unpleasant, and something connected with Jimmie.
Augusta knew that she could never believe in any of this. It was just the patter of a trade. The combinations suggested the rhymes that went with them. That was all. But, just the same, and although she was very grateful for the help that the girl had given her, Augusta was wishing that Mary Donahue would take her cards and go home.