"Now shuffle the cards and see it for yourself," Mary Donahue wheedled. "You've got it in you—I can see it in your eyes. And when you have that, you can see things even if you don't know the names of the cards. And if you haven't got it, you could study them all your life—I've known people that did—and never know boo."
Augusta took the cards with evident reluctance, but began to shuffle them with an ease and sureness that caught Wardwell's attention instantly. He remembered that Rose Wilding had had an unexplained horror of cards. She had never permitted even the most innocent game of cards in her house. It had been a difficult and, at times, an irksome restriction. He knew that more than once she had lost good boarders on account of it. But Rose Wilding had persisted in her strong way, with few words, giving neither excuse nor explanation. So he was fairly certain that Augusta had never before held in her hands a pack of cards.
Now he watched with sharp interest Augusta's deft, natural handling of the cards, and, somehow, he did not like it.
With a feeling of growing excitement Augusta laid out the piles as she had seen the other girl do, and without wishing to do so found herself naming over the piles as she went around. She had not thought that she would remember how they ran. But she found that she could not forget if she tried. And it seemed that she did not want to try.
Augusta turned up the first of the piles and looked blankly at them. Her hands were cool and firm, but she felt herself trembling inwardly with a queer, creeping surge of blood. And she drew a quick breath of relief when she saw that the cards meant nothing to her. They were just a jumble of red and black and white, just pictures and spots. She wondered at herself for being excited about it.
"Don't try to read anything from them," the gypsy voice at her ear commanded. "Just don't think of anything, and just keep staring steady and steady until your eyes cross."
Wardwell, watching, felt an irritated impulse to interfere. He hated to see Augusta's delicately sensitized mind submitted to these gypsy tricks. But, man-like, he was afraid of appearing ridiculous if he made any kind of a fuss. For, after all, it was only a little bit of fooling.
Augusta sat limp and stared indifferently down at the cards as she had been told to do. Her eyes fell out of focus and she continued to stare while the spots and pictures moved about in a soothing, restful sort of blur that lured her mind farther and farther away from the grip of conscious thought.
Without any wish to do so, and without any thought, she began to speak.
"To my house: there is laughter and fear, coming together and in pairs. I must never, never share my house with any third one. There is water laughing by it all the day long in the sunshine, and a bleak wind whistling past in the night.