voice.

Keeping her eyes fixed on the cards, which now and again she touched with
a fat finger, and without looking at Sylvia, she said:

"Madame has led a very placid, quiet life. Her existence has been a boat
that has always lain in harbour--" She suddenly looked up: "I spent my
childhood at Dieppe, and that often suggests images to me," she observed
complacently, and then she went on in quite another tone of voice:--

"To return to Madame and her fate! The boat has always been in harbour,
but now it is about to put out to sea. It will meet there another craft.
This other craft is, to Madame, a foreign craft, and I grieve to say it,
rather battered. But its timbers are sound, and that is well, for it
looks to me as if the sails of Madame's boat would mingle, at any rate
for a time with this battered craft."

"I don't understand what she means," said Sylvia, in a whisper. "Do ask
her to explain, Anna!"

"My friend asks you to drop metaphor," said the older woman, drily.

The soothsayer fixed her bright, beady little eyes on Sylvia's flushed
face.

"Well," she said deliberately, "I see you falling in love, and I also see
that falling in love is quite a new experience. It burns, it scorches
you, does love, Madame. And for awhile you do not know what it means, for
love has never yet touched you with his red-hot finger."