ave looked.

The woman was powerfully built with astonishing breadth of shoulder
and length of limb, but perfectly proportioned. She was young,
hardly more than twenty, St. George fancied, and of the peculiar
litheness which needs no motion to be manifest. Her clear skin was
of wonderful brown; and her eyes, large and dark, with something of
the oriental watchfulness, were like opaque gems and not more
penetrable. Her look was immovably fixed upon St. George as if she
divined that in some way his coming affected her.

"We will have our hymn first." Mrs. Manners' words were buzzing and
pecking in the air. "What can I have done with that list of numbers?
We have to select our pieces most carefully," she confided to St.
George, "so to be sure that _Soul's Prison_ or _Hands Red as
Crimson_, or, _Do You See the Hebrew Captive Kneeling?_ or anything
personal like that doesn't occur. Now what can I have done with that
list?"

Her words reached St. George but vaguely. He was in a fever of
anticipation and enthusiasm. He turned quickly to Mrs. Manners.

"During the hymn," he said simply, "I would like to speak with one
of the women. Have I your permission?"

Mrs. Manners looked momentarily perplexed; but her eyes at that
instant chancing upon her lost list of hymns, she let fall an
abstracted assent and hurried to the waiting organist. Immediately
St. George stepped quietly down among the women already fluttering
the leaves of their hymn books, and sat beside the mulatto woman.

Her eyes met his in eager questioning, but she had that temper of
unsurprise of many of the eastern peoples and of some animals. Yet
she was under some strong excitement, for her hands, large but
faultlessly modeled, were pressed tensely together. And St. George
saw that she was by no means a mulatto, or of any race that he was
able to name. Her features were classic and of exceeding fineness,
and her face was sensitive and highly-bred and filled with repose,
like the surprising repose of breathing arrested in marble. There
was that about her, however, which would have made one, constituted
to perceive only the arbitrary balance of things, feel almost
afraid; while one of high organization would inevitably have been
smitten by some sense of the incalculably higher organization of her
nature, a nature which breathed forth an influence, laid a
spell--did something indefinable. Sometimes one stands too closely
to a statue and is frightened by the ne