little back room on the first floor, in which the sorceress ate, slept,
and received visitors. She rose from an old rocking-chair as the visitor
entered, and, regarding her with a pair of beady black eyes, bade her sit
down.

"Are you the fortune-teller?" inquired the girl.

"Men call me so," was the reply.

"Yes, but are you?" persisted Miss Dowson, who inherited her father's
fondness for half crowns.

"Yes," said the other, in a more natural voice.

She took the girl's left hand, and pouring a little dark liquid into the
palm gazed at it intently. "Left for the past; right for the future,"
she said, in a deep voice.

She muttered some strange words and bent her head lower over the girl's
hand.

[Illustration: "She muttered some strange words and bent her head lower
over the girl's hand."]

"I see a fair-haired infant," she said, slowly; "I see a little girl of
four racked with the whooping-cough; I see her later, eight she appears
to be. She is in bed with measles."

Miss Dowson stared at her open-mouthed.