This continued for some time. Then, of a sudden, warmth came over the girl as she saw that gray turn to the faint blue of a morning sky. Leaning eagerly forward, she waited.
“Yes! Yes!” Her lips formed words she did not speak. The lower portion of that blue turned to gray and green. She was looking now at rocky ridges half overgrown with glorious trees—spruce, birch, and balsam. Beneath this were dark, cool waters. Above, fleecy clouds raced across a dark blue sky. On the water were no boats, in the forest no people. She was gloriously alone.
“Oh!” Florence breathed, stretching out her hands as if to gather it in.
Now there came another change. Fading away as in the movies, half the trees became bare and leafless. The rocks, the grass and all the barren branches were bedecked with snow. The surface of the water glistened. “Winter,” she whispered. Then, as a strange emotion swept over her, she cried, “Where? Where?”
As if frightened away by that sudden sound, the vision vanished and there she sat staring at a glass ball that was, as far as her eyes could tell her, just a hard glass ball and nothing more.
“How strange!” She pinched herself. “How very strange!”
But now a change was coming over the room itself. It was slowly filling with a dim light. She made out indistinctly a broad, black, dead fireplace, and above it on the mantel a great green dragon with fiery eyes.
Then with a sudden start she sat straight up. On the opposite wall, against the midnight blue velvet, a shadow had appeared, a very distinct shadow of a man. Or was it of a man? The nose was long and sharp. The chin curved out like the tip of a new moon. It was a terrifying profile.
“The—the Devil!” She did not say the words—only thought them. At the same time she seemed to hear her dead aunt say, “All this fortune telling business belongs to the Devil.”
“Well? How about it?”