me study
awfully hard, but I rather liked it as there wasn't much else to do
except play with Echochee, and she became tiresome occasionally. Later
he started me at the piano, and the violin, and I loved to work after
that. For he's quite a remarkable musician, really! I suppose our
library must have a thousand books, and I've read nearly all of
them--besides stacks of the modern ones we always brought from our
semi-annual cruises 'to the world'--as he used to call those trips.
Don't you simply adore Blasco?"

"I suppose you mean Ibanez," I said, rather pleased at being able to air
this familiarity with literary personages.

"Ibanez, then," she casually agreed, "if you prefer calling him by his
mother's name."--And, not knowing upon what hazy path this would lead
me, I laughingly admitted:

"Well, I've only tackled one of his things, and haven't even finished
that yet." Adding, with perhaps a slightly malicious desire to bring her
superior knowledge to bay: "You read him in the original, I suppose?"

"Not freely enough to be quite relaxing. But on our cruise last summer
we got a very good translation in French--really, much better than the
English, I think."

Again I laughed, as a light entered my muddled outlook because of this
astonishing information that accounted for much I had not been able to
reconcile with her isolated life. From the moment she had mimicked the
cook I had been kept in a state of wonderment. I had felt her
superiority; I had marveled at the cultivation that clung about her as a
royal robe. Now it was explained. Music, literature, languages!

"That night you protested about the bomb," I asked, "did you hear me
call?"

Could it have been that some of the animation left her face as she
answered slowly:

"Oh, was it you? I heard someone call to a person named Sylvia."

"But--isn't that your name?"

"Oh," she laughed, "I haven't nearly so pretty a name as that!"

I was crazy to be the judge, but asked, instead:

"Did your--father ever explain why he was afraid of detectives?"

"Nothing more than that he was fearfully hunted and persecuted. When I
was almost a baby he had to run away because of a political plot. He
escaped with me after," her voice lowered, "my mother had been killed by
the revolutionists, and we've been hiding here ever since, awaiting the
message that will bring him back to be President again; although while
the other party is in power its agents would arrest him--and