it myself. Events that transpired in a far foreign land a score of
years ago, known, as I thought, to no creature under heaven, he told me
of as if they had transpired yesterday. The very thoughts that I
thought in that by-gone time he revealed as if my heart lay open before
him. How, then, could I doubt? If he could lift the veil of the
irrevocable past, why not be able to lift the veil of the mysterious
future? He took the hour of our child's birth and ascended to the
battlements, and there, alone with the stars of heaven, he cast his
horoscope. Olivia, men in all ages have believed in this power of
astrology, and I believe as firmly as I believe in Heaven."

Lady Kingsland listened, and that quiet smile of half amusement, half
contempt never left her lips.

"And the horoscope proved a horrorscope, no doubt," she said, the smile
deepening. "You paid your astrologer handsomely, I presume, Sir
Jasper?"

"I gave him nothing. He would take nothing--not even a cup of water.
Of his own free will he cast the horoscope, and, without reward of any
kind, went his way when he had done."

"What did you say the name was?"

"Achmet the Astrologer."

"Melodramatic again! And now, Sir Jasper, what awful fate betides our
boy?"

"Ask me not! You do not believe. What the astrologer foretold I shall