orra or a
noble from Gambodia.

"We want the truth about this as much as Mr. St. George does," she
said quickly, smiling for the first time. St. George liked her
smile. It was as if she were amused, not absent-minded nor yet a
prey to the feminine immorality of ingratiation. "Besides," she
continued, "I wish to know a great many things. How did the mulatto
woman impress you, Mr. St. George?"

Miss Holland loosened her coat, revealing a little flowery waist,
and leaned forward with parted lips. She was very beautiful, with
the beauty of perfect, blooming, colourful youth, without line or
shadow. She was in the very noon of youth, but her eyes did not
wander after the habit of youth; they were direct and steady and a
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
involved in their statements concerning this matter."

"This 'Tabnit,