d because Davy was good to look at and had an agreeable voice.

"Why, who's that?" she suddenly exclaimed, gazing off to the right.

Davy turned and looked. "I don't know her," he said. "Isn't she queer
looking--yet I don't know just why."

"It's Selma Gordon," said Jane, who had recognized Selma the instant
her eyes caught a figure moving across the lawn.

"The girl that helps Victor Dorn?" said Davy, astonished. "What's SHE
coming HERE for? You don't know her--do you?"

"Don't you?" evaded Jane. "I thought you and Mr. Dorn were such pals."

"Pals?" laughed Hull. "Hardly that. We meet now and then at a
workingman's club I'm interested in--and at a cafe' where I go to get
in touch with the people occasionally--and in the street. But I never
go to his office. I couldn't afford to do that. And I've never seen
Miss Gordon."

"Well, she's worth seeing," said Jane. "You'll never see another like
her."

They rose and watched her advancing. To the usual person, acutely
conscious of self, walking is not easy in such circumstances. But
Selma, who never bothered about herself, came on with that matchless
steady grace which peasant girls often get through carrying burdens on
the head. Jane called out:

"So, you've come, after all."

Selma smiled gravely. Not until she was within a few feet of the steps
did she answer: "Yes--but on business." She was wearing the same
linen dress. On her head was a sailor hat, beneath the brim of which
her amazingly thick hair stood out in a kind of defiance. This hat,
this further article of Western civilization's dress, added to the
suggestion of the absurdity of such a person in such clothing. But in
her strange Cossack way she certainly was beautiful--and as healthy and
hardy as if she had never before been away from the high, wind-swept
plateaus where disease is unknown and where nothing is thought of
living to be a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five. Both before and
after the introduction Davy Hull gazed at her with fascinated curiosity
too plainly written upon his long, sallow, serious face. She, intent
upon her mission, ignored him as the arrow ignores the other birds of
the flock in its flight to the one at which it is aimed.

"You'll give me a minute or two alone?" she said to Jane. "We can walk
on the lawn here."

Hull caught up his hat. "I was just going," said he. Then he
hesitated, looked at Selma, stammered: "I'll go to the edge of the
lawn an