And silently stole away,”
she whispered to herself.
She wondered in a dreamy sort of way whether those people, while they reluctantly packed a few tricks of their crooked trade, had recalled a large, ruddy-faced girl who had visited them once or twice to have her fortune told, and did they know she was that girl?
“Fortunes!” she exclaimed. “Fortunes!” Then she laughed a low laugh.
At once her face sobered. Was it, after all, a laughing matter, this having your fortune told? For some surely it was not. She had seen them seated on hard chairs, waiting. There were lines of sorrow and disappointment on their faces. They had come to ask the crystal-gazer, the palmist, the phrenologist, the reader of cards or stars, to tell their fortune. They wanted terribly to know when the tide of fortune would turn for them, when prosperity would come ebbing back again. And she, Florence, all too often could read in their faces the answer which came to her like the wash of the waves on a sandy shore:
“Never—never—never.”
“And what do these tellers of fortunes predict?” she asked herself. She did not know. Only her own fortune she knew well enough. Had she not had it told a half hundred times in the last months?
“My fortune!” she laughed anew. “What a strange fortune it would be if all they told me came true! A castle, a farm, a city flat, a sea island, a mountain home, a dark man for a husband, a light one for a husband, and one with red hair! Whew! I’d have to be a movie actress to have all that.
“And yet—” Once again her smile vanished. Was there, after all, in some of it something real? That crystal ball now—the one she had seen that very afternoon. She had been told that visions truly do come to those who gaze into the crystal ball. Had she not seen visions? And that fair-haired girl, had she not seen visions as well?
Once again her mood changed. What was it this girl had wanted to know? She had said, “My long lost father!” Was her father really lost? Who was her father? She was dressed like a child of the rich. Was she rich? And was she in danger?