“But if you care to go a little way—” she spread out her hand. “Then I am here to show you for—let me see—” She pretended to consider. “Oh, you shall pay me two dollars. Huh? Will that be O. K.?” Her voice took on a playful note.
“Two dollars will be all right. And may I begin at once?” There was in Florence’s words a note of eagerness that was genuine.
“This,” she was thinking, “is a fresh way of approach. Perhaps there is something to this crystal gazing. I may become a famous gazer. How grand that will be!
“Besides,” came as an afterthought, “I may be able to discover some worthwhile facts about that girl who saw those pictures in the crystal ball. Surely those pictures were real enough. But how did they come there? Could her imagination produce them? If so, would I too be able to see them?” She had a feeling that they had been produced by some strange magic—or was it magic? She could not be sure.
“Now—” Madame Zaran, the crystal-gazer, took on a manner quite professional as she hid Florence’s two dollars on her person. “Now we shall proceed.”
She motioned the girl to the ebony chair beside the table where the crystal ball rested. Then with nervous, active fingers she began arranging articles on that table.
Florence was interested in these few objects. A raven carved from black marble, a bronze dragon with fiery eyes, and a god of some sort with an ugly countenance and a prodigious mouth, all these were on that table. Madame arranged them about the crystal ball, but some distance away from it. Then, as if the ball were a sacred thing, she lifted it with great care to place it in a saucer-like receptacle over which a bronze eagle perpetually hovered.
The girl was much interested in the gazer’s hands. In her wanderings about the city in search of fortune telling facts, she had picked up interesting bits about hands. She was convinced that long slender fingers belonged to a person of a nervous and artistic temperament and that a very broad hand told of force coupled with great determination. Madame’s hand was fairly broad, but her fingers were not long. Instead they were short and curved. “Like the claws of some great cat,” the girl thought with a shudder. Never had she seen fingers that seemed better suited to clawing in hoards of gold.
“And she would not care how she came by it,” Florence thought. And yet, how could she be sure of that?
“Now,” Madame said in a changed tone, “look at the crystal. Concentrate. There is no spirit moving in the crystal. You need not draw one out. The pictures of past and future you are to see by gazing in the crystal are to come from within your own mind, or shall come to you from the spirit world outside the crystal.