dily.

He turned from her, walked to the window, and kept his back to her
while he spoke.

"You have no faith in fortune-tellers, clairvoyants, astrologers, and
the like, have you, Olivia?"

"Most certainly not!"

"Then what I have to say will scarcely trouble you as it troubles
me--for I believe; and the prediction of an astrologer has ruined my
peace for the past month."

"Is that all? The mountain in labor has brought forth a mouse. My
dear Sir Jasper, how can you be so simply credulous?"

"I knew you would laugh," said Sir Jasper, moodily; "I said so. But
laugh if you can. I believe!"

"Was the prediction very terrible, then?" asked his wife, with a smile.
"Pray tell me all about it."

"It was terrible," her husband replied, sternly. "The living horror it
has cast over me might have told you that. Listen, Olivia! On that
night of our baby boy's birth, after I left you and came here, I stood
by this window and saw a spectral face gleaming through the glass. It
was the face of a man--a belated wayfarer--who adjured me, in the
Savior's name, to let him in."

"Well, you let him in, I suppose?"

"I let him in--a strange-looking object, Olivia, like no creature I
ever saw before, with flowing beard and hair silver-white--"

"False, no doubt."

"He wore a long, disguising cloak and a skull-cap," went on Sir Jasper,
"and his face was blanched to a dull dead white. He would have looked
like a resuscitated corpse, only for a pair of burning black eyes."

"Quite a startling apparition! Melodramatic in the extreme! And this
singular being--what was he? Clairvoyant, astrologer, what?"

"Astrologer--an Eastern astrologer--Achmet by name."

"And who, probably, never was further than London in his life-time. A
well-got-up charlatan, no doubt."

"Charlatan he may have been; Englishman he was not. His face, his
speech, convinced me of that. And, Olivia, charlatan or no, he told me
my past life as truly as I knew it myself."

Lady Kingsland listened with a quiet smile.

"No doubt he has been talking to the good people of the village and to
the servants in the house."

"Neither the people of the village nor the servants of the house know
aught of what he told me. He showed me what transpired twenty years
ago.

"Twenty years ago?"

"Yes, when I was fresh from Cambridge, and making my first tour.
Events that occurred in Spain--that no one under heaven save myself can
know of--he told me."

"