“Some gypsies should be trapped.” Sandy laughed, seizing her hand teasingly. “But as for the moose of Isle Royale, they have become too numerous for the island. They are trapping them and taming them a little. In the spring they are to be taken to game sanctuaries on the mainland where there is an abundance of food. But look!” he exclaimed. “We are taking up all the time raving about this island. What about our musicians? Let’s have a tune.”
His words were greeted with hand-clapping. Tum Morrow and his companions tuned up and for the next half hour the studio walls echoed to many a melody. Some were of today, modern and rhythmical, and some of yesterday with all their tuneful old melodies.
During this musical interlude Florence, seated in a dark corner, gave herself over to reflections concerning the amusing, mysterious and sometimes threatening events of the days just past.
“It is all so strange, so intriguing, so rather terrible!” she was thinking to herself. “This Madame Zaran, is she truly a genius at crystal gazing? How could she fail to be? Did I not, myself, see a vision in the crystal ball? And that girl June, who could doubt but that she saw herself as she was when a child, with her father? And yet—” the whole affair was terribly disturbing. They had compelled the girl, a mere child, to pay two hundred dollars for this vision. How much for the next? They had promised to reveal her father’s whereabouts, tell her when he would return. Could they do that? “Ten years!” she whispered. “One is tempted to believe him dead. And yet—”
Then there was the voodoo priestess, she with the black goat. They were to visit her on the morrow. “And I have an appointment with Madame Zaran too. A busy day!”
She thought, with a new feeling of alarm, of Jeanne’s experience on that day. “Wish I hadn’t told her of that thieving gypsy fortune teller. Get her into no end of trouble. Dangerous, those gypsies!” Then, at a sudden remembrance, she smiled. It was good that Jeanne had won the dancing contest; good, too, that she had helped that gypsy child of the bright shawl. Jeanne had “cast bread upon the waters.” It would return.
Then of a sudden as the music stopped, she gave a start. Before her eyes there appeared to float a shadow, a curiously frightening shadow. It was the shadow of a face she had seen on the midnight blue of Madame Zaran’s studio, a face that had somehow reminded her of Satan. “My dear old aunt used to say Satan had a hand in all fortune telling,” she whispered. But then, aunts were almost always old-fashioned and sometimes a little foolish.
Now the music played so well by Tum Morrow and his companions came to an end. There was instant applause, and Florence was wakened from her disturbing day dream.
“Can you play one of Liszt’s rhapsodies?” Miss Mabee asked.
“I’m sorry,” Tum said regretfully, “I have never studied them.”