The two women, after a glance at each other, slowly advanced to the stove and held out their hands to the warmth. The younger of the two fastened her gaze upon Mrs. Sage. A covetous light gleamed in her black eyes as she took in the fur coat and the wondrous hat. “Bring in a couple of chairs from the kitchen, Joe,” ordered the host. “Set down, everybody. Put on a little more coal, will you, Horace? How did you know about me, Queen?” He seemed to expand a little with his own rather vicarious importance. The gypsy waited impressively until the chairs were produced. “The stars brought me the news,” she said, and sat down, signaling her companion that it was now permissible for her to do the same. “They make no mistakes. I am the chosen mouthpiece of the stars. I speak only of the things they tell me.” “Umph!” from Mr. Gooch. The two women looked at him so piercingly that he turned away, conscious of a most uncomfortable feeling. “The stars, Mister, witnessed the birth of your son a hundred thousand years ago—his birth and also his death,” said the “queen,” satisfied with the squelching of the scoffer. “They also looked down upon your own deathbed, Mister, a hundred thousand years ago.” There was an awed silence while the company sought mentally for a solution to this tremendous and incomprehensible enigma. “Look here, Ollie,” said Mr. Link, blatantly jocular; “if you’ve been dead as long as all that you ought to be buried. You stop in at my office in the morning.” This remark properly was ignored by the gypsy queen. She paid no attention to the strained laugh that followed the undertaker’s sally. She sat hunched forward in the chair, her chin in her hands. “The stars travel through space at the rate of a million miles a minute,” she said oracularly. “How long, Mister, would it take mortal man to travel a million miles?” The question, addressed abruptly to Mr. Baxter, found him at a loss for an answer. All he could do was to shake his head helplessly. “I see it is beyond you,” she went on. “So fast travel the stars that in one day, such as ours, they have put behind them a hundred thousand of the tiny things we call years.” No one present was prepared to dispute the statement. “Even as I speak to you now, Mister, my words are as ancient history to the stars. So! I lift my hand. The stars are a thousand years older than they were before I lifted it. Do you understand, Mister? Is it not clear to you?” “Not very,” confessed Mr. Baxter, humbly. “See. I snap my fingers. Not in scorn for your ignorance, but to illustrate. While I was snapping my fingers, some of the stars shot through a million miles of space, taking thousands of our years to do it.” “Mathematically—” began Mr. Sage, but got no further. The gypsy proceeded, impressively: “They have witnessed all that is to transpire on this earth of ours during the next thousand years or two.” “By gosh—it sounds reasonable,” said Mr. Link. “I never thought of it in that way before.”