I do not think he knew Nancy, even by name. I do not think he knew me, or had the least notion that we were related. Neither of us had ever met him before. He put his hand to his brow, still gazing at the cards. "But when are you going to begin my fortune, sir?" broke in Nancy. "I would rather not tell it at all, madame," he answered. "_Cannot_ you tell it?--have your powers of forecasting inconveniently run away?" said she incautiously, her tone mocking in her disappointment. "I could tell it, all too surely; but you might not like to hear it," returned he. "Our magician has lost his divining-rod just when he needed it," observed a gentleman with a grey beard, a stranger to me, who was standing opposite, speaking in a tone of ill-natured satire; and a laugh went round. "It is not that," said the signor, keeping his temper perfectly. "I could tell what the cards say, all too certainly; but it would not give satisfaction." "Oh yes, it would," returned Nancy. "I should like to hear it, every bit of it. Please do begin." "The cards are dark, very dark indeed," he said; "I don't remember ever to have seen them like it. Each time they have been turned the darkness has increased. _Nothing_ can show worse than they do now." "Never mind that," gaily returned Ann. "You undertook to tell my fortune, sir; and you ought not to make excuses in the middle of it. Let the cards be as dark as night, we must hear what they say." He drew in his thin lips for a moment, and then spoke, his tone quiet, calm, unemotional. "Some great evil threatens you," he began; "you seem to be living in the midst of it. It is not only you that it threatens; there is another also----" "Oh, my goodness!" interrupted Nancy, in her childish way. "I hope it does not threaten Edwin. What _is_ the evil?--sickness?" "Worse than that. It--is----" Signor Talcke's attention was so absorbed by the aspect of the cards that, as it struck me, he appeared hardly to heed what he was saying. He had a long, thin black pencil in his long, thin fingers, and kept pointing to different cards as if in accordance with his thoughts, but not touching them. "There is some peculiar form of terror here," he went on. "I cannot make it out; it is very unusual. It does not come close to you; not yet, at any rate; and it seems to surround you. It seems to be in the house. May I ask"--quickly lifting his eyes to Ann--"whether you are given to superstitious fears?" "Do you mean ghosts?" cried Ann, and Charley Palliser burst out laughing. "Not at all, sir; I don't believe in ghosts. I'm sure there are none in our house." Remembering my own terror in regard to the house, and the nervous fancy of having seen Captain Fennel in it when he was miles away, a curious impression came over me that he must surely be reading my fortune as well as Nancy's. But I was not prepared for her next words. Truly she has no more reticence than a child.