Arrived at the fork where one street ran into two the women paused as if uncertain which to take. It was necessary to look up and read the names, and as they did so a man crossing the street caught a momentary glimpse of one of the up-turned faces silhouetted against an oil lamp, which, from its place some yards away, was brought into level with the girl’s head. He stopped, almost with a start, then crossing quickly to the shadow of an entry, waited till the girls resumed their way, upon which he came out and followed them.
They went, however, but a couple of hundred yards farther. Before a house in a small secluded Platz they stopped and stood hesitating. On the door was a plate where by the light of a bluish lamp which hung in the portico could be read the one word, “Parabosco.” The courage of the two girls, if checked, soon returned; they went boldly to the door, which at their approach opened silently and admitted them. The man who had followed them now paced up and down the Platz in thoughtful indecision.
He was a good-looking young fellow, alert and soldier-like; yet in the strong moonlight the face seemed much more than that of a mere city lounger; its beauty was intellectual, its distinction manifestly came from a sense of power, power in action united with gentleness of manner. That was the man’s attraction, his easily imagined fascination, that sense of quiet, unobtrusive strength; the charm lay not in his mere features but in the spirit behind them.
Presently, as though his resolve was taken, he went up to the blue-lit door. An unseen hand opened it as before and, without a word, he passed in. Meanwhile the two girls had entered a room hung with dark velvet on which were worked strange cabalistic devices. The air was subtily perfumed and a light shining through a globe of blue crystal just illuminated the room enough to enhance its character of mystery. Perhaps the most striking feature of this was the dead silence, a stillness that seemed to strike the visitors dumb with its almost appalling intensity.
“I wish we had not come.” Fear forced out the whisper from one of the girls.
“We cannot help it now,” returned her companion, whose voice, scarcely above her breath, seemed only just to repress a tremor.
“I had no idea it was a place like this,” the other said, looking round with almost a shudder. “If they—he—the man should find out——”
“He will, easily, if you chatter.”
“Well,” persisted the irrepressible one, “this is not what I bargained for. I thought it would be a piece of fun, but I don’t—oh!”
Her talk was cut short by a woman in oriental dress who had suddenly appeared and, holding the curtains aside, was motioning the visitors to pass through. With a momentary hesitation they followed her gesture, and as they crossed a small ante-room a door in front of them swung open and they found themselves in the presence of the fortune-teller to whom their curiosity had attracted them. The sanctum of this modern soothsayer was furnished with the usual stock-in-trade of his profession, objects calculated to inspire awe—or something worse—in the vulgar, and to throw a glamour of the supernatural over what, stripped of the mystic surroundings, might have been a common-place personality. The flamboyant chart of the heavens, the divining crystal, a skull, the glowing brazier, all were there, and at a table by a great parchment volume sat the fortune-teller. A sharp-eyed man with clean-shaven, cunning face in which a certain suggestion of intellectuality was spoilt by the expression resulting from the habitual practice of roguery.