“No; it was not kind nor honest, but I did not realize it until this moment, and now I ask your pardon. Many of the offences of us men are the outcome of ignorance rather than meanness. We know no better. Our conceit has stood in the way of our enlightenment. Forgive all my shortcomings, and remember my defects no more. Be a little kinder still and do one other service for me. Read me my future.”
“I am no occultist,” she answered, laughing.
“No matter. I have a fancy for believing you are for the time being. Tell me what lies ahead. It may keep up my courage. Since you are my confessor, I don’t mind telling you that there are moments when I feel a childish cowardice about what I may have to meet, and wish I could run away from it all and hide forevermore.”
“That recalls a bit of rhyme I read years ago which has always stuck in my memory,” she said:
“‘What is Life, Father? A battle, my child,
Where the strongest arm may fail;
Where the wariest eye may be beguil’d,
And the stoutest heart may quail.’
“’Tis no shame to admit that one’s courage is not always high. No one lives always on the heights. I know something about those moments of childish cowardice you speak of; but there, I belong to the sex that is supposed to have the right to be cowardly—we are even driven to it. Courage brings reproach upon us, while the more we shrink and cower and quail and complain the more ‘womanly’ we are said to be. What a fine outlook for the human race! But as to your future. Now I am an astrologer and must draw your horoscope.” (This was accomplished by scratching several circles on the walk with the end of her parasol.) “There, the rings and dots and figures all mean tremendous things. I shall not weary you, however, by telling you the why and wherefore of everything. I shall stick to facts. Here goes: I see a journey by water which ends where the sun sets. You will meet disappointments and difficulties; will know privations and dangers, and also that most dreadful form of homesickness—the homesickness of one who has no home. But you will overcome all obstacles and be what is called successful; you will find your place and hold it. You will become bigger and stronger in body and in character, and you will never come back here.”
“And the indescribable thing called Happiness; has it no place in my horoscope?” he asked, after a pause.
“Is it not included in the thing called Success?” she answered. “Can the defeated be happy?”
“On the whole your reading is not half bad, as the English say, when they want to compliment a thing, and I believe in it.” Yet he sighed as he spoke. The promised success was not alluring, meaning as it did, lifelong separation from the sun that warmed his life.
Still he was in dead earnest when he said he believed in her prophecies. Long ago he had made up his mind that this girl was his fate—not in the sense that she was likely to unite her life to his. He had never been honestly hopeful of that in spite of his steady perseverance; but it seemed to him that in some way she was to direct his life, to be the star of his destiny, as it were. And never was that belief stronger upon him than now when he knew that the end of their daily association had come.