He spoke with much solemnity, but, more than his words, the magnetism of his touch affected Laline's sensitive nature. She shivered and turned pale. "Can you really read that in my hand?" she asked, fearfully. "Clearly. This man will love you, and you will not be able to escape from him. Before you are seventeen you will be his wife." "Oh, it's impossible!" "Not at all. It's inevitable," he said--"written indelibly, for all who understand to read, here in the centre of your hand!" And, as he spoke in slow impressive tones, he pointed his finger at random into her upturned palm. Looking up to see the effect of his prophecy, he found that she was leaning back in her seat, pale to the lips. "What is the matter, child?" he exclaimed. "You will laugh," she answered, in a low troubled tone, "but, as you held my hand and told me these things, something flashed into my head that you were right, and that there would be in my life a will against which I should fight in vain. The feeling terrified me, and I can't forget it!" She raised her hands to her eyes, in which tears were shining, and pressed them close. Wallace Armstrong watched her, surprised and amused by what he considered her folly and weak-mindedness. In reality Laline was neither foolish nor specially weak-minded, only abnormally sensitive to influences to which a coarser nature would have been impervious. Looking into Wallace Armstrong's bold bright eyes, in the depths of which a scornful smile was lurking, the young girl seemed to read there, better than any fortune-teller could inform her, a will, selfish, resolute, and cruel, a nature attracted by and yet strongly antagonistic to her own, a personality she might grow to fear and even, it might be, to hate, but which she would never be able to regard with indifference. Not in so many words did these convictions come upon her, but the sense of them grew as she gazed, her soft, near-sighted eyes, that had something of the wistfulness of a dumb animal, straining to realize what she saw. At last Wallace broke the silence with a laugh. "If we sit so still, staring at each other, people will think that I am mesmerising you," he said. "And, by-the-way, I believe I could." "Please don't try!" she exclaimed, starting from her seat and pushing her hair from her forehead with a quick nervous gesture peculiar to her. "I must be getting back home now to see after papa's dinner." "I will walk up with you," he said; "but you haven't yet told me whether you would like to go back to England, leaving your father comfortably settled here, provided for for life, and with all his bills paid." "Why do you ask me such questions," she said, "when you know what you suggest is impossible?" Then an inspiration seized Armstrong. In his pocket was another advance from his uncle to provide his niece Laline with medicines, new clothes, and other necessaries. Wallace directed his steps to the Rue Royale.