"You are engaged to be married. Your engagement will be broken. You will be very unhappy. Later, you will be thankful. Later you will realise that sorrow is sent to make us nobler than we were." With an intake of the breath, the medium started, straightened, opened her eyes. At the shock of it Margaret had started also. "But----" The medium, in her former voice, low and gentle, interrupted. "I can tell you nothing else. I do not know what was said. But I am sorry if you have had bad news." Margaret stood up, replacing her glove. She knew, as we all know, that certain gifted organisms hear combinations of sound to which the rest of us are deaf. She knew, as many of us also know, that there are other organisms that can foresee events to which the rest of us are blind. But she knew too that in the same measure that the auditions of composers are not always notable, the visions of clairvoyants are not always exact. The knowledge steadied and partially comforted, but partially only. At the entrance, Lennox stood with Miss Bleecker. A little beyond were Paliser and her mother. Mrs. Amsterdam, minus her money, must have rushed away. Poppet Bleecker laughed and questioned: "No horrors?" Lennox questioned also, but with his eyes. Margaret hesitated. Then she got it. Taking the girl's hand she patted it and to Lennox said, and lightly enough: "Do go in. I want to see if what the medium says to you conforms with what she said to me." Yet, however lightly she spoke, behind her girdle was that sensation which only the tormented know. Beyond on the stage, the fat woman, now at the piano, was accompanying a girl who was singing a brindisi. The girl was young, good-looking, unembarrassed, very much at home. Her dress, a black chiffon, became her. Then, in a moment, as Lennox entered the booth, Margaret joined her mother and looked at the girl. "What is she singing?" Paliser covered her with his eyes. "Verdi's _Segreto per esser felice_--the secret of happiness. Such a simple secret too." "Yes?" Margaret absently returned. She was looking now at the booth. Quite as vaguely she added: "In what does it consist?" "In getting what we do not deserve." There was nothing in that to offend. But the man's eyes, of which already she had been conscious, did offend. They seemed to disrobe her. Annoyedly she turned. Paliser turned with her. "Verdi's bric-a-brac is very banal. Perhaps you prefer Strauss. His dissonances are more harmonic than they sound." Now though there was applause. With a roulade the brindisi had ceased and the singer as though pleased, not with herself but with the audience, bowed. The fat woman twisting on her bench, was also smiling. She looked cheerful and evil. "I do believe that's the Tamburini," Mrs. Austen remarked. "I heard her at the Academy, ages ago." The usual touch followed. "How she has gone off!" The fat woman stood up, and, preceded by the girl, descended into the audience.