maginative power, or if other lines confirm it, it may
mean a tendency to insanity.' Then she gave a startled exclamation and
paused a moment. 'Oh, girls!' she cried. 'How interesting! I have
never found this mark in a hand before, but it is in one of the
plates.'

"'What?' we cried in chorus, breaking the long-enforced silence.

"'_It is the suicide line!_'

"Poor little Timoroso jerked her hands away, and turned toward us with
a frightened face gleaming through the dusk as white as her collar.
Her distress was pitiful.

"You see, Elsie had been telling so many truths about us, that poor
little Tim believed implicitly in her fortune-telling ability. She
felt that her doom was sealed; that the cruel finger of a relentless
fate had written it so plainly in her tell-tale palm, that all who saw
it might read. She hid her face on my shoulder and sobbed so violently
that it put an end to the seance.

"Elsie had to come out from behind the screen to help soothe her.
'Why, Tim, dear, you mustn't take it so to heart!' she insisted. 'Let
me look at your hands again. There may be plenty of lines to
counteract that one; besides, I am only a beginner, and liable to make
a wrong interpretation.'

"By sheer force of her strong, cheery personality, she calmed Tim
after awhile, and had her laughing like the gayest of us. Nobody but
Elsie could have done it.

"When Miss Hill made an excuse to come in a little after nine o'clock,
we were eating apples and telling riddles as demurely as Quaker
ladies."

[Illustration: "'SHE HID HER FACE ON MY SHOULDER'"]

When Olive had finished reading this letter aloud, she had to read
several more before she came to another mentioning the subject in
which she and Sara were most interested; and after that there were
only occasional paragraphs scattered here and there among pages of
personal news and school happenings.

"I am afraid that Timoroso is going to be ill," wrote Sophia, in one
of those gossipy epistles. "She is as white and listless as a tired
little ghost. She has slept scarcely any since our palmistry evening,
but I did not discover the fact until last night. I woke suddenly to
find her standing by the window in the moonlight, with a blanket
thrown round her. She was catching her breath in long, choking sobs,
and wringing her hands in the greatest distress. The idea that she
must sometime take her own life haunts her night and day. I found that
she had been brooding over it, t