th without a single tooth in it, began to deal her dirty
cards on the table. She dealt them in piles, then gathered them up,
and then dealt them out again, murmuring indistinguishable words. Emma,
turning pale, listened with bated breath, gasping with anxiety and
curiosity.

The fortune-teller broke silence. She predicted vague happenings:
happiness and children, a fair young man, a voyage, money, a lawsuit, a
dark man, the return of some one, success, a death. The mention of this
death attracted the younger woman's attention. "Whose death? When? In
what manner?"

The old woman replied: "Oh, as to that, these cards are not certain
enough. You must come to my place to-morrow; I will tell you about it
with coffee grounds which never make a mistake."

Emma turned anxiously to me:

"Say, let us go there to-morrow. Oh, please say yes. If not, you cannot
imagine how worried I shall be."

I began to laugh.

"We will go if you wish it, dearie."

The old woman gave us her address. She lived on the sixth floor, in a
wretched house behind the Buttes-Chaumont. We went there the following
day.

Her room, an attic containing two chairs and a bed, was filled with
strange objects, bunches of herbs hanging from nails, skins of animals,
flasks and phials containing liquids of various colors. On the table a
stuffed black cat looked out of eyes of glass. He seemed like the demon
of this sinister dwelling.

Emma, almost fainting with emotion, sat down on a chair and exclaimed:

"Oh, dear, look at that cat; how like it is to Misti."

And she explained to the old woman that she had a cat "exactly like
that, exactly like that!"

The old woman replied gravely:

"If you are in love with a man, you must not keep it."

Emma, suddenly filled with fear, asked:

"Why not?"

The old woman sat down familiarly beside her and took her hand.

"It was the undoing of my life," she said.

My friend wanted to hear about it. She leaned against the old woman,
questioned her, begged her to tell. At length the woman agreed to do so.

"I loved that cat," she said, "as one would love a brother. I was young
then and all alone, a seamstress. I had only him, Mouton. One of the
tenants had given it to me. He was as intelligent as a child, and gentle
as well, and he worshiped me, my dear lady, he worshiped me more than
one does a fetish. All day long he would sit on my lap purring, and all
night long on my pillow; I could feel his heart beating,