brocade over her knees. "I suppose she isn't satisfied; she wants more."

"Naturally. I cannot imagine what other reason she could have for
insisting on a personal interview," her brother agreed, dryly. He
retired into the _Transcript_ as a Trappist withdraws into his vows. A
chastened client of Mr. Fowler's once observed that a half-hour's
encounter with him resulted in a rueful of asphyxiated topics.

Miss Maria, however, preferred disemboweling hers, "I shouldn't have
consented," she snapped. "Hugh, if you would be so good as to sit down.
You are obstructing the light. And the curtain-cord. If you could
refrain from twisting it for a few moments."

Hugh let his long, high-shouldered figure lapse into the window-seat.
"And besides, we're all dying to know what she looks like," he
suggested.

"Speak for yourself, please," said Miss Fowler, with the vivacity of the
lady who protests too much.

"I do, I do! Good Lord! I'm just as bad as the rest of you. All my life
I've been consumed to know what Uncle Hugh could have seen in a
perfectly obscure little person to make him do what he did. There must
have been something." His eyes travelled to a sketch in pencil of a
man's head which hung in the shadow of the chimneypiece, a sketch whose
uncanny suggestion might have come from the quality of the sitter or
merely from a smudging of the medium. "Everything he did always seemed
to me perfectly natural," he went on, as though conscious of new
discovery. "Even those years when he was knocking about the world,
hiding his address. Even when he had that fancy that people were