Oh, the glory of waking up in the morning and then before you have time to wonder where you are, seeing the telegraph poles flying by! On a train, on a train, on a train, Peggy’s joyous thought kept time to the sound of the wheels on the rails. After looking interestedly out for a few minutes on a barren sort of white crusted country, level as a prairie and without house or building of any kind, Peggy turned and shook Katherine heartily by the shoulder.

“Poor child,” she shouted into the other’s reluctant ears, “I hate to waken you, but open your eyes and tell me if you think we’re nearly there?”

“Where?” murmured Katherine and sank back into the peace of slumber.

“Why, there, THERE, at your home—will—you—wake—up?” Each of the last words was accompanied by more vigorous shaking, “as—I—said—” shake, shake, “I—hate—to—waken—you—”

“Yes, you do,” reproached Katherine in perfectly normal tones, turning staring mockingly at her room-mate. “Yes, you hate it—I thought you were a wreck, you shook me so hard.”

“I am a wreck after all that difficulty to make you wake up,” declared Peggy serenely. “Now, let’s hurry and go to breakfast.”

“Do you know what your new name is going to be as soon as we get back to school?” threatened Katherine.

“No,” indifferently.

“Pig Peggy.”

“Oh,” said Peggy, “well, I’ll look you up one in the dictionary,—maybe in the Latin dictionary, and then you’ll never know what it means and can’t pay me back for it.”

It is surprising how quickly two girls can be ready for breakfast when they hear the waiter crying out “Last—call for breakfast—” through a rocking train.

Grape-fruit, coffee, and toast was what they ordered, and then they laughed to find that every other girl in the diner was eating exactly the same thing. For grape-fruit, coffee, and toast is the college and school girl train-breakfast the country over.

“I feel as if I’d been away a hundred years,” said Katherine excitedly as the train at last pulled into the station. “Oh, they’ll all be down at the train, I wired them to. And how proud I’ll be to show them you, Peggy, and tell them that you are the one they’ve heard so much about in all my letters since the very first, which was full of your rose-tree episode.”

The porter had already gone ahead with their bags, and they, peering eagerly out of the windows as they made their way to the platform, sought to catch a glimpse of Katherine’s family.

As they stepped off it seemed to Peggy that a veritable whirlpool engulfed them. On every side were enthusiastic people kissing her and Katherine indiscriminately. And she in her gladness to get there and her happiness in meeting with such friendly acceptance kissed them back with impartial enthusiasm, Katherine’s mother and father, her younger sister, an aunt, and three “kid brothers”—these were the reception committee that were now hustling the girls to the big waiting automobile that belonged to Katherine’s father and overwhelming them with expressions of pleasure and welcome.

The house, when they came to it, was a great homey affair, with many rich rugs and pictures that did not, however, dazzle by their magnificence but seemed to fit into the general atmosphere of comfort. Peggy, who had never visited in so wonderful a place before, danced from attic to cellar, as light as thistledown, and sent the whole family into roars of appreciative laughter at her naÏve and hearty approval of it all.

“You’re home, now, Peggy,” Katherine said.

And Peggy nodded happily. “Why, of course,” was her comment. “It certainly feels like it, and I love every darling member of your perfectly grand family, Katherine Foster.”

Two days after their arrival the Fosters had a Christmas party for them, and for the first time in her life Peggy helped to trim a Christmas tree, and wrap up such an enormous number of tiny tissue-covered bundles that her fingers ached from tying string.

There was the grand march around the tree, the gorgeous Christmas supper, and afterward dancing and dancing and dancing until Peggy’s head whirled and her very heart beat time to music.

On Christmas day there came for each of the girls a fascinating little package bearing the Huntington address on the outside. Katherine’s was a woven gold chain with a delicate and beautiful pearl pendant attached, and Peggy’s was a watch with a good sized diamond sparkling in its handwrought gold.

“Oh—how lovely,” breathed she in ecstatic surprise, and then suddenly her face clouded. “We forgot to send him a thing,” she reminded contritely.

“Never mind,” comforted Katherine, “we’ll go to the clairvoyant and help get his grandson back for him and I guess that will mean more to him than any little set of cuff links or knitted tie we might have given him.”

“So we will,” mused Peggy, “do you think we could go to-morrow?”

Not the morrow, but the day before New Year’s finally saw Katherine’s family persuaded to let the two girls go to Madame Blakey, who had really a considerable reputation in the town for correctly reading futures in her glass of water. Not that Katherine’s father and mother believed in that sort of thing, but they actually knew people who seemed to, and they could see no harm in permitting the girls to go. But when the two daring experimenters with things yet to come had been conveyed by James, the chauffeur, in their big touring car to the residence of Madame, they found all the blinds closed and no sign of life about the place anywhere. A woman from next door told them that Madame Blakey had gone away on her vacation to visit relatives.

“Well,” sighed Katherine in miserable disappointment, “I suppose other people have to have vacations too. But it does seem heartbreaking that all our plans should be spoiled and poor Mr. Huntington should never find his grandson, after all.”

“Yes,” agreed Peggy, brushing away the baffled tears, “isn’t there somebody else in town who—who sees things ahead?”

“Oh,” objected Katherine, “not that mother would let us go to—but listen, we might go first and then explain all about it and she’d understand our motive. Let’s look in the personals of the newspaper. Sometimes there is one advertised there.”

So they sent James for a paper and eagerly scanned its columns until they found in inviting, bold type, “Madame La Mar, palmist and clairvoyant. I read the future: I tell your past: consult me about your business or your heart affairs.”

“Ah,” cried Katherine, and she read the address to James, while she squeezed Peggy’s hand under the heavy robe.

A few minutes later the machine had drawn up before a frowsy little apartment building, very different from and far less prepossessing than the neat, newly painted little house of Madame Blakey’s.

In spite of James’ expression of mild surprise, the two girls got out and entered the building, searching as they did so for some card or call board by which they might locate Madame La Mar’s rooms. There was no lock system on the doors and no cards of residents. They went on into the main hall and saw a row of uninviting doors, each with some name scrawled on it in pencil. On one door alone was a soiled visiting card bearing the proud name of Madame La Mar.

“Do you dare knock?” asked Katherine.

“Maybe I will in a—in a minute,” hesitated Peggy. “Don’t you think perhaps we’d better have James in?”

“No,” said Katherine, “he’s right out there, anyway, and could hear us if we wanted him for anything, and this apartment must face the street, so we could lean out and call him if it gets too trancified for us in there.”

But they did not have to work up their courage to the point of forcing themselves to knock on the door, for the great Madame La Mar herself, hearing their whispering voices, now threw it open and stood before them in all the magnificence of tight fitting black velvet embroidered with occasional sequins that glittered here and there.

She was a big woman with vivid black eyes and black hair turning in places to gray. Her cheeks bloomed with an unnatural radiance, and her eyebrows were the longest and the most arched and the most charcoal dusky that Peggy had ever seen off the stage.

“Ah,” crooned a honeyed voice, “did you want to see me?”

Katherine, speechless, nodded.

“Was it about—did you want a reading?” There was a very professional business-like quality now creeping into the voice in addition to its first honeyed accents.

“Yes,” Peggy answered up.

“Did you have an appointment or have you ever come to me before?” temporized the woman.

“No,” said Peggy, “but we thought—we thought you might be willing to see us anyway.”

“Yes, yes, indeed, come in,” said the woman vaguely. “Come in and we will have a little music.”

The girls were seated, full of bewilderment, in a sunny, rather vacant room, while the seeress swished across the floor like an animated mountain and, going over to a piano on which the dust shone, sat down and began to play a simple exercise like those Peggy had practiced when she was a child and had her fingers rapped if she made a mistake.

In increasing wonderment the two watched the self-confident figure picking out its little exercise and apparently completely oblivious of their presence and as thrilled by the feeble tinkle, tinkle it was accomplishing, as if the sound were a whole orchestra of beautiful music.

After a time she stopped, and turned to the girls with a small smile. “I like music,” she said. “Oh, so fond of music. I’m taking lessons.”

“She needs ’em,” whispered Katherine.

“Did you enjoy my little roundelay?” she inquired anxiously.

“It was—it was very nice,” Peggy tried to say politely. “But we thought you were Madame La Mar, the fortune teller.”

“I am Madame La Mar,” responded the woman, as pleased as peaches. “Yes, indeed, who else could be her, you know?”

“Her grammar!” groaned Katherine in a tiny voice.

“Now if you will come into the studio,” the woman urged, “I will read for you from the past, present or future or all three of them. Just state your desires.”

“There was something special,” Peggy told her, “we thought you might be able to read ahead for us.”

“Of course,” agreed the generous creature, “anything. But my charge is a dollar a person.”

“That’s all right.”

“Then come in. Now the young lady in the caracal coat sit on my left, please, and you other on my right. I shall want you to keep very still and not disturb the workings of the supernatural. Which would you rather have me do, tell you by cards or by your palm or by the crystal?”

“Will—will one be just as effective as the other?” asked Peggy doubtfully.

“Be as what?”

“Be as effective, as good, you know, Madame La Mar.”

“Oh, yes,” explained the seeress condescendingly. “I can tell it one way as well as another and I never make a mistake. I’m not like some of these people in this town—limited, you know, to a single style. You can choose any sort whatever and it goes with me. I’m a woman of my word, I am,” her voice was rising, “and I challenge any other clarvoy’nt in this town to tell as much for the money as I do, why—”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure,” pacified Peggy. “And now suppose you tell us something. It’s what we came for.”

“With the crystal,” Katherine put in, “and maybe our palms too.”

“No, not our palms,” cried Peggy in consternation, looking at the rather dirty red hands of the husky fortune teller. “I think the crystal alone is best.”

“Well, then.” The red hands caught up a little crystal globe that was lying on the table. “All look into this with me, just as hard as you can,” she urged, “and think with all your might about the question you want me to solve for you, and pretty soon I’ll see things come in here and that will be the future.”

The room settled down to a curious, stifling, nerve-racking silence while the prophetess gazed into her gleaming crystal.

She was breathing hard, and after a time it seemed to the two girls that a faint film or cloud went across the glassy brightness of the little globe, and this filminess took vague shape and disappeared.

Each girl thought as hard as she could. “How can we find Mr. Huntington’s grandson for him? Where is he now?”

Finally, in a sepulchral voice, startlingly different from her own, the woman began to speak: “I see a girl,” she murmured.

This beginning was so far from promising and so utterly different from what they had someway expected that Katherine burst out into hysterical laughter. “She could see two of ’em if she looked very hard,” she chortled too audibly in her friend’s ear.

“There, you’ve broken the spell,” complained the woman peevishly. “How can you expect me to find the future for a pack of laughing hyenas that don’t believe what I’m telling them, anyway?”

“Oh, please,” said Peggy, much ashamed of Katherine’s rude outburst, “we want to hear it, and we will perhaps believe it when we have heard something. Indeed, Katherine wasn’t doubting what you did say, you know—she only—”

“Quiet,” hissed the woman.

Was it true that a cloud, filmy and light and vapory went drifting across the clear crystal surface again? The girls felt no impulse to laugh now.

“I see a girl—I see snow—”

Katherine thought that she couldn’t help it if she looked out of the window, but this time refrained from comment and held her breath while she watched the mysterious smoky appearance of the crystal.

“I see a loss of a long time ago—many years—relative torn from relative—”

Peggy and Katherine clutched at each other’s knees.

“Walking, walking, so tired,” mumbled the woman, “a long white field. I see an initial—let’s see what the initial is. Is it A? no, it is not A. Is it B—no, no, now I have it, it is H.”

Peggy gave a tiny scream and the voice continued:

“Cold, very cold, far east of here and a little north. A college room, a mandolin, a young man plays on the mandolin. Also I see—” the voice rose excitedly, “a school lawn, a moon, this time it is warm, I do not understand it, and a group of young men are picking up little—little roses from the ground, and a girl leans from a window—”

“Peggy,” screamed Katherine, “she means the time the rose tree fell out.”

Here the prophetess burst into tears and shoving the crystal away from her declared that she would not read another thing for two such ill mannered young ladies who dragged her in and out of her trances just as if these were not the worst kind of nervous strain. She was through with them, she was. Just as she was beginning to see something of interest they shouted at her and spoiled it all. What kind of spirits would remain in a room with two girls that acted like that? They could pay her their dollar apiece, they could, and go, and she would go back to her music and think herself well rid of them, she was sure. Thank them, and good-by, and please don’t ever come and bother her again with their hoydenish ways. Could they find their way to the street? She, for her part, was too unnerved to take them.

With their heads still whirling from the queerness of it all the two girls groped their way out through the dark hall and drew in great breaths when they were once more safe in the sunlight of the street. They stumbled forward toward the car, where the imperturbable James was awaiting them. As they were about to clamber in Peggy clutched at her room-mate’s sleeve.

“Look back, she’s watching us,” warned Peggy, and there sure enough in the window of the room they had just quitted were the outlines of the great figure of the black velvet prophetess, a curious brilliant fixedness in her dark eyes.

“I think she got her initial from the door of your car, Katherine—look.”

Katherine’s father’s initials were H. B. F., Howard Baker Foster, and of course the seeress could have seen them, looking down into the street as she was now.

“Maybe,” demurred Katherine, “but, Peggy, someway I don’t believe she did. I think that H stood for Huntington just as all the rest of her story seemed to have some truth in it, and if only my feelings hadn’t gotten away with me we’d be there yet, hearing all the things that are ever going to happen to us, I’m perfectly convinced.”

“Well, evidently, Young Grandson is in college somewhere,” interposed Peggy flippantly. “You remember about the college room and the mandolin? I’m glad that his poverty didn’t prevent his getting a fine education, anyway. Now we’ve got a clue, all we have to do to find him, friend Watson, is to go to all the men’s colleges and walk through all the dorms until we come to a room from which the gentle tinkle of a mandolin steals forth—and then, and then—we knock on the door. Young Grandson answers it, and—there we are. We take him back to Mr. Huntington and all goes well. And listen, Watson, my dear detective companion, I think our search through those colleges is just going to be one of the jolliest things that ever happened to two nice-looking girls.”

“You forget that we won’t know Young Grandson when we see him.”

“Clues, my dear Watson, clues. No detective ever went far without finding clues. First, we shall run across his picture in one of the college annuals. And we shall say, ‘Why, here, what a strong resemblance this picture bears to Mr. Huntington, of Huntington House.’ And that’s the first thing. We read under the picture and find that his name is John James Smith, and then we go to the registrar—”

By this time the car was rounding the Foster drive, and the two girls alighted, in haste to tell all of Katherine’s interested and somewhat disapproving family about their adventures with the soothsayer.

Each of the small brothers agreed with Katherine that it must be all true, but that was the only support she found at home for her belief.

When it came time for the girls to start back to Andrews, they were torn with conflicting emotions. They were glad they were going back, and yet they could hardly bear to tear themselves away from the home that seemed now to belong to Peggy, too. So when they and their suit-cases were at last regretfully taken to the train by the entire family, the girls were dissolved in a flood of tears as they settled themselves for the journey, and the train had been under way some two hours before they managed to say a single word to each other.