when he saw her eyes he knew she
had been crying and that Drusilla had really gone.

"I'm sorry," he began and then he stopped; there was nothing that he
could say. "Has Drusilla gone?" he asked at length and Mrs. Hill
answered him, almost kindly.

"Yes," she said, "she was summoned by a telegram. Her father took her
down this morning."

He stood thinking a minute, then he shook his head regretfully and
started off down the steps.

"She was sorry not to have seen you," she added gently but Denver made
no reply. He was weak again now and inadequate to life; he could only
crawl back like some dumb, wounded animal, to the sheltering gloom of
his cave. But as he sat there stolidly, now trying to make some plan,
now endeavoring to become reconciled to his fate, a rage swept over him
like a storm-wind that shakes a tree and he burst into gusty oaths. The
fates had turned against him, his horoscope had come to nothing; he had
followed the admonitions of Mother Trigedgo and this was the result of
her advice. She had told him to beware how he revealed his affection,
but nothing about what to do when he had fallen asleep while his beloved
sang only for him.

He drew out the Oraculum, by which the Man of Destiny had ordered the
least affairs of his life, and read down through the thirty-two
questions. Only once on each day could he consult the mystic oracle, and
once only in each month on the same subject, lest the fates be outworn
by his insistence. At first it was Number Thirteen that appealed to his
fancy:

"Will the FRIEND I most reckon upon prove faithful or TREACHEROUS?" But
he knew without asking that, whatever her failings, Drusilla would never
prove treacherous. No, since he had taken her for his friend he would
never question her faithfulness; Number Twenty-six was more to his
liking:

"Does the person whom I love, LOVE and regard me?"

He spread out a sheet of paper on his littered table and dashed off the
five series of lines, and then he counted each carefully and made the
dots at the end--two dots for the two lines that came even and one for
those that came odd. The first two came odd, the next two even, the last
one odd again; and under that symbol the Oraculum Key referred him to
section B for his answer. He turned to the double pages with its
answers, good and bad, and his brain whirled while he read these words:

"Thy heart of thy beloved yearneth toward thee."

He closed the book religiously and pu