Florence could not have been more startled by these words had they been shouted in her ear. They had been said quietly by Madame Zaran. She had returned. And in the meantime the sinister shadow had vanished from the wall.
“I—why, I—” With a sort of mental click the girl’s mind returned to her vision of water, forest, and sky. “I saw—”
“Wait! Do not tell me, not now.” Madame held up a hand. “Ah, you are one of those who are fortunate! It is given to very few that they shall see visions in the crystal ball on the very first time of their trying. You will go far. You must come again and again.”
Madame’s hands were in motion. Florence fancied she could see those claw-like fingers raking in piles of crisp new greenbacks.
“But I may be doing her a grave injustice,” she reproved herself.
“I shall return,” she found herself saying to Madame Zaran.
“Perhaps tomorrow?”
“Perhaps tomorrow.”
Scarcely knowing what she did, the girl let herself out of the room, caught the elevator, and next moment found herself in the bright sunlight, which, after all that midnight blue darkness and air of mystery, seemed very strange indeed.
“Now for Sandy and his glass box,” she thought to herself when her mind had become accustomed to the world of solid reality about her. Sandy was her youthful red-headed reporter. Sandy was her “ghost writer.” She supplied the material of her own column, “Looking Into the Future.” It was Sandy who pounded it all into form on his trusty typewriter. His “glass box,” as she laughingly called it, was an office on the sixth floor of the newspaper office building that looked down upon the city’s slow, easy-going river.