still trembling, as if cold. She sees it. She catches my eye, and nods to the paper in my hand. ''Good news, miss?'' she asks; and it is as if the letter has worked some trick upon her, too: for her voice seems light to me—dreadfully light—and her face seems sharp. She puts away the thimble; but watches, watches. I cannot meet her gaze.
Richard is coming. Does she feel it, as I do? She gives no sign. She walks, she sits, as easily as before. She eats her lunch. She takes out my mother''s playing-cards, begins the patient dealing-out of solitary games. I stand at the glass and, in reflection, see her reach to take a card and place it, turn it, set it upon another, raise up the
kings, pull out the aces ... I look at my face and think what makes it mine: the certain curve of cheek, the lip too full, too plump, too pink.
At last she gathers the pack together and says that if I will shuffle and hold it, and wish, she will study the fall of the cards and tell me my future. She says it, apparently quite without irony; and despite myself I am drawn to her side, and sit, and clumsily mix the cards, and she takes them and lays them down. ''These show your past,'' she says, ''and these your present.'' Her eyes grow wide. She seems suddenly young to me: for a moment we bend our heads and whisper as I think other, ordinary girls, in ordinary parlours or schools or sculleries, might whisper: Here is a young man, look, on horseback. Here is a journey. Here is the Queen of Diamonds, for wealth—