really distressing me very much!"

Madame Cagliostra looked very seriously at the speaker.

"Well, perhaps it is so," she said at last. "Of course, we are sometimes
wrong in our premonitions. And I confess that I feel puzzled--exceedingly
puzzled--to-day. I do not know that I have ever had so strange a case
as that of this English lady before me! I see so many roads stretching
before her--I also see her going along more than one road. As a rule, one
does not see this in the cards."

She looked really harassed, really distressed, and was still conning her
cards anxiously.

"And yet after all," she cried suddenly, "I may be wrong! Perhaps the
necklace has less to do with it than I thought! I do not know whether the
necklace would make any real difference! If she takes one of the roads
open to her, then I see no danger at all attaching to the preservation of
this necklace. But the other road leads straight to the House of Peril."

"The House of Peril?" echoed Sylvia Bailey.

"Yes, Madame. Do you not know that all men and women have their House of
Peril--the house whose threshold they should never cross--behind whose
door lies misery, sometimes dishonour?"

"Yes," said Anna Wolsky, "that is true, quite true! There has been, alas!
more than one House of Peril in my life." She added, "But what kind of
place is my friend's House of Peril?"