Amidst other hidden secrets, sedulously guarded from the teachers, Madame de Nino's pupils were in possession of a pack of what they called fortune-telling cards. They were not playing cards, but thin, small, transparent squares, made from the leaf of the sensitive-plant. On each square was a carefully painted flower, purporting to be an emblem. Rose, happy love; cross-of-Jerusalem, sorrow; snowdrop, purity; bachelor's-button, vanity; hyacinth, death; and so on. Three or four of these squares were placed on the palm of the hand, the flowers downwards, so that one square could not be distinguished from another. They would in most cases curl slightly and leap from the hand; but should any one adhere to it, it was deemed a proof of affinity with the owner, a foreshadowing of her fate to come. For instance: if it were the cross-of-Jerusalem that remained, the holder was pronounced to be destined to sorrow; if the bachelor's-button, the girl's life was to be passed in vanity. It was at the best but a silly pastime, meet only for those silly girls; but there are of those schoolgirls who, to this hour, would confess to a superstitious belief in them, unexplainable alike to themselves and to any known law of reason. Else why, they would ask, should one particular leaf have clung always to Adeline de Castella, and been so singularly exemplified in her destiny? That it did cling to her is a fact: otherwise, I should never have thought of noticing any pastime so puerile. The first time these cards were tried, the girls were in their room, supposed to be in bed. Mam'selle Fifine had gone down with the light, and Rose had lighted one of her large wax tapers, which she kept locked up from prying eyes. Adeline had both her hands stretched out, three squares on each. Five of the squares rolled off quickly, more quickly than usual; the sixth slightly fluttered, and then settled down, quiet and passive on her palm. Janet Duff took it up at length, but dropped it again as one startled. "Oh! it is bad!" she said, in a whisper. Mary Carr turned the square. It was a French marigold. "'French marigold: unhappy love; its end possible death,'" read Janet Duff from the explanations. "It is about the worst in the pack." Some of the girls shivered--that dortoir was always cold. Adeline laughed merrily. "It is only nonsense," she said: and she spoke as she thought. And the singular part was, that Adeline de Castella had tried those cards since, a dozen times at least; and this ill-omened French marigold had always clung to her whenever it was of those placed on her hand. The hyacinth had been dreaded so much from the first, that Janet Duff took it out of the pack. And the French marigold, so far as was seen, never rested on any other hand than Adeline de Castella's. "It is certainly singular," mused Adeline, when she tried her fate at the cards for the last time before leaving school, and the French marigold clung to her as usual.