When he spoke again, in his humorous drawl, with his bold black eyes twinkling and challenging her, his words could not have been heard by anyone ten feet away: “Will you permit me, your highness, to read the crystal for you? I’m really rather a wizard at it—a wow, as they say on Broadway, though I assure you, your highness, that I’m not a man to succumb to the insidiousness of slang. You must be rather tired of gazing, gazing, gazing into this intriguing but slightly flawed ball of glass—” and he touched it with a long, delicate finger, with a humorous contemptuousness that suggested an intimate bond between the professional and the amateur—himself and herself. “Please go away!” Sally pleaded breathlessly. “Why do you want to make fun of me? I have to earn my living somehow—” “Do you?” he smiled, his brows going higher, while deep laugh wrinkles appeared suddenly in the clear olive of his lean cheeks. “Now I’m sure you should let me read the crystal for you, for it is obvious that you have not looked into the future at all!” He cupped his slim, beautiful hands about the crystal, his back bending in an arch as graceful as the arch of a cat’s back. The posture brought his face very near to hers, so that she saw the fine grain of his skin, caught a faint, indefinable but enchanting odor from his sleek dark hair, almost as dark as her own. He had dropped his hat upon the edge of the little table, and it too fascinated and repelled her, for its dove-gray richness insolently suggested that its owner possessed boundless money and almost wickedly sure taste. But every item of his dress told the same story, so she really should not have picked on the hat particularly. But she did; she wanted to brush it off the table, to see his flash of anger at its being soiled with the dust from “rubes’” feet— “Marvelous!” His voice became mockingly hushed and mysterious, as he pretended to gaze into the very heart of the crystal. “I see your whole past boiling away in this magic crystal—slightly flawed, though it is!” “My past!” she shivered, forgetting that he was faking just as she did. “You’ve run away from home, from poverty,” he went on in that mocking, too beautiful voice, his black eyes shifting from the crystal to play their insolent, confident fire upon her wide-eyed face. “And you’ve run away from—a man! Of course,” he added lightly, “you’ll always be running away from a man—men—every man that looks at you. You’re absolutely irresistible, you know, child! But ah, at last you will find him—the man from whom you will not run away! Now, shall I read the future for you?” “Please, go away. Gus is coming!” Sally pleaded through childishly quivering lips that would have showed ashen-pale if they had not been thickly overlaid with carmine.