"Well, mother sometimes helps this poor old woman, and, one day, when she happened to call, Alice and Edith and I were in the kitchen helping mother. 'God bless you, lady,' she said,--you know how they talk,--'you've got a kind heart; and how are all the young ladies? It's time, I'm thinking, they had their fortunes told.' 'Oh, yes,' we all said, 'tell us our fortunes, mother,'--we always called her mother. 'I'll tell you yours, my dear,' she said, taking hold of my hand. 'Your fortunes are too young yet, ladies,' she said to Alice and Edith; 'come to me in a year's time and, maybe, I'll tell you all about him.'" "You dear!" said Henry, by way of interruption. "Then," continued Angel, "she took me aside, and looked at my hand; and she told me first what had happened to me, and then what was to come. What she told me of the past"--as if dear Angel, whose life was as yet all future, could as yet have had any past to speak of!--"was so true, that I couldn't help half believing in what she said of the future. Now you're laughing again!" "No, indeed, I'm not," said Henry, perfectly solemn. "She told me that just before I was twenty, I would meet a young man with dark hair and blue eyes, very unexpectedly,--I shall be twenty in six weeks,--and that he would be my fate. But the strangest is yet to come. 'Would you like to see his face?' she said. She made me a little frightened; but, of course, I said, 'Yes,' and then she brought out of her pocket a sort of glass egg, and told me to look in it, and tell her what I saw. So I looked, but for a long time I could see nothing; but suddenly there seemed to be something moving in the centre of the glass, like clouds breaking when the sun is coming out; and presently I could see a lamp burning on a table; and then round the lamp shelves of books began to grow out of the mist; then I saw a picture hanging in a recess, a bowed head with a strange sort of head-dress on it, a dark thin face, very sad-looking--" "Why, that must have been my Dante!" said Henry, astonished in spite of himself.