"How absurd!" thought Sylvia to herself. "She actually takes me for a
young girl! What ridiculous mistakes fortune-tellers do make, to be
sure!"

"--But you cannot escape love," went on Madame Cagliostra, eagerly. "Your
fate is a fair man, which is strange considering that you also are a fair
woman; and I see that there is already a dark man in your life."

Sylvia blushed. Bill Chester, just now the only man in her life, was a
very dark man.

"But this fair man knows all the arts of love." Madame Cagliostra sighed,
her voice softened, it became strangely low and sweet. "He will love you
tenderly as well as passionately. And as for you, Madame--but no, for me
to tell you what you will feel _and what you will do_ would not be
delicate on my part!"

Sylvia grew redder and redder. She tried to laugh, but failed. She felt
angry, and not a little disgusted.

"You are a foreigner," went on Madame Cagliostra. Her voice had grown
hard and expressionless again.

Sylvia smiled a little satiric smile.

"But though you are a foreigner," cried the fortune-teller with sudden
energy, "it is quite possible that you will never go back to your own
country! Stop--or, perhaps, I shall say too much! Still if you ever do go
back, it will be as a stranger. That I say with certainty. And I add that
I hope with all my heart that you will live to go back to your own