The light was so arranged that it fell on the visitors, leaving the fortune-teller in comparative obscurity, like a great spider in the corner of his web.
“Ladies,” he said in his professional phrase, with a well practised trick of voice, unnatural and therefore calculated to add to the air of the supernatural, “you have come, I presume, to consult the stars and the oracles of the unseen world whose humble interpreter I am. It is well; the time is propitious, the hour is golden.”
Doubtless the emphasis he laid upon the last word was intended as a hint, for with that he pushed toward his clients a silver shell in which lay several coins. Each of the girls added a piece of gold, at which the eyes gleaming out of the semi-darkness seemed to give a flash of satisfaction. With that the soothsayer made a show of the tricks of his trade. He described figures with his wand; cast chemicals into the brazier, causing ghastly flames to leap and spirt; he took, perfunctorily indeed, an observation of the heavens and affected an invocative rapture. All this, however, did not last long, possibly because the performer may have received an intimation that another visitor was waiting to consult him. But the farce was gone through with a gravity which did credit to the restraint behind that very mundane face.
“Now will one of you ladies advance and place the lines of your hand under observation?” he said in a tone of commanding request.
Still keeping her hood well over her face, one of the girls went forward to the table and extended her hand, a long aristocratic hand of exquisite shape, a hand that even to a man less shrewd than the fortune-teller must have revealed the station of its owner. Whether indeed he had suspected or not the character of his visitors, the man glanced up from the hand with a sharp look of inquiry at the half-concealed face. The scrutiny was but momentary, next instant he was bending with a magnifying glass over the outstretched palm. The time-honoured jargon of the fortune-teller was repeated; then the cards told the same tale with alluring variations, the stars gave a confirmatory horoscope.
“Jupiter in conjunction with Venus points to a great, we might almost venture to say a royal marriage,” the seer pronounced with professional glibness.
“No, no, not that!” the girl exclaimed with a vehemence which startled the professor. “At least, I mean it is not certain, is it? It can be prevented, it can be fought against?”
The smile on the man’s face did not hide the look of intense curiosity with which he regarded her.
“Fight against the stars?” he protested with a deprecating laugh. “You are a bold young lady to imagine that.”
“Against the stars? No,” she returned impetuously. “But against the powers here below that would coerce fate.”