ad once seen a painting of the Maid of Orleans in a foreign gallery
that carried so much of spiritual earnestness that he felt that he could
appreciate how easy it was for the French army instinctively to follow
her lead, and how much easier it was for the poor dupes of ignorance and
superstition to believe that this overmastering spiritual nature was the
product of witchcraft.

Absorbing though these thoughts were, they did not exclude another train
which had to do with the mysterious banner bearer, and as he entered his
hotel he clenched his right hand suddenly and muttered to himself, "I
must dismiss her from my thoughts."

CHAPTER III

THE MYSTERIOUS YOUNG WOMAN

Dr. Earl took a late dinner at his sister's house, after having spent an
hour with his fiancee on the way. There were just the four of them at
table, his sister and her husband, his brother and himself.

His sister was the oldest member of his family, which comprised but the
three of them, his father and mother having died some years before.

During the college days of both himself and his brother, who was two
years his junior, his sister had assumed the role of a mother to them,
and right devotedly had she filled the part. She had been more of a
"pal" to them than anything else, and some years' residence in England
during her schooldays had broadened her vision of the true meaning and
value of this relation between those of opposite sex and particularly
between brother and sister.

She possessed now, as always, the unbounded respect and confidence of
these two young men of thoroughly dissimilar character and temperament,
and she was the repository of the sacred secrets of each of them, which
she was warned she must never betray to the other. And she never did.

Eight years previous to these occurrences, she had married George
Ramsey, President of the Gotham Trust Company, which institution had
recently absorbed half a dozen weaker concerns doing a similar business,
and more recently had taken over from the New York bankers, who were
stockholders in the trust company, the handling of most of the public
utility securities that were floated in this country. But George Ramsey
was not the pretentious pawnbroker in spirit and manner that so often
presides over the destinies of American banks, but he was a
philosophical financier who understood perfectly the strength and
weakness of the system under which he worked, and who, while he wondered
at