While we were trying hard to convince each other, my aunt Chance sat as dumb as a fish, stirring her tea and thinking her own thoughts.  When we made our appeal to her, she seemed as it were to wake up.  “Ye baith refer it to my puir judgment?” she says, in her broad Scotch.  We both answered Yes.  Upon that my aunt Chance first cleared the tea-table, and then pulled out from the pocket of her gown a pack of cards.

Don’t run away, if you please, with the notion that this was done lightly, with a view to amuse my mother and me.  My aunt Chance seriously believed that she could look into the future by telling fortunes on the cards.  She did nothing herself without first consulting the cards.  She could give no more serious proof of her interest in my welfare than the proof which she was offering now.  I don’t say it profanely; I only mention the fact—­the cards had, in some incomprehensible way, got themselves jumbled up together with her religious convictions.  You meet with people nowadays who believe in spirits working by way of tables and chairs.  On the same principle (if there is any principle in it) my aunt Chance believed in Providence working by way of the cards.

“Whether you are right, Francie, or your mither—­whether ye will do weel or ill, the morrow, to go or stay—­the cairds will tell it.  We are a’ in the hands of Proavidence.  The cairds will tell it.”

Hearing this, my mother turned her head aside, with something of a sour look in her face.  Her sister’s notions about the cards were little better than flat blasphemy to her mind.  But she kept her opinion to herself.  My aunt Chance, to own the truth, had inherited, through her late husband, a pension of thirty pounds a year.  This was an important contribution to our housekeeping, and we poor relations were bound to treat her with a certain respect.  As for myself, if my poor father never did anything else for me before he fell into difficulties, he gave me a good education, and raised me (thank God) above superstitions of all sorts.  However, a very little amused me in those days; and I waited to have my fortune told, as patiently as if I believed in it too!

My aunt began her hocus pocus by throwing out all the cards in the pack under seven.  She shuffled the rest with her left hand for luck; and then she gave them to me to cut.  “Wi’ yer left hand, Francie.  Mind that!  Pet your trust in Proavidence—­but dinna forget that your luck’s in yer left hand!” A long and roundabout shifting of the cards followed, reducing them in number until there were just fifteen of them left, laid out neatly before my aunt in a half circle.  The card which happened to lie outermost, at the right-hand end of the circle, was, according to rule in such cases, the card chosen to represent Me.  By way of being appropriate to my situation as a poor groom out of employment, the card was—­the King of Diamonds.