bit critical, and she spoke slowly and with graceful sanity in a
voice that was without nationality. She might have been the
cultivated English-speaking daughter of almost any land of high
civilization, or she might have been its princess. Her face showed
her imaginative; her serene manner reassured one that she had not,
in consequence, to pay the usury of lack of judgment; she seemed
reflective, tender, and of a fine independence, tempered, however,
by tradition and unerring taste. Above all, she seemed alive,
receptive, like a woman with ten senses. And--above all again--she
had charm. Finally, St. George could talk with her; he did not
analyze why; he only knew that this woman understood what he said in
precisely the way that he said it, which is, perhaps, the fifth
essence in nature.

"May I tell you?" asked St. George eagerly. "She seemed to me a very
wonderful woman, Miss Holland; almost a woman of another world. She
is not mulatto--her features are quite classic; and she is not a
fanatic or a mad-woman. She is, of her race, a strangely superior
creature, and I fancy, of high cultivation; and I am convinced that
at the foundation of her attempt to take your life there is some
tremendous secret. I think we must find out what that is, first, for
your own sake; next, because this is the sort of thing that is worth
while."

"Ah," cried Miss Holland, "delightful. I begin to be glad that it
happened. The police said that she was a great brutal negress, and I
thought she must be insane. The cloth-of-gold and the jewels did
make me wonder, but I hardly believed that."

"The newspapers," Mr. Frothingham said acidly, "became very much