re come and the eyelids are a little
weary.' She is, of course, a profoundly tragic person."

"Has she been very unfortunate?"

"Unfortunate indeed. Her youth was passed in bitter poverty; her first
marriage was disastrous, and when joy came at last in an ideal second
marriage it was shattered by her husband's mysterious death. Yes; he was
drowned; found drowned in the lake on their estate in Germany. Mercedes
has never been there since. She has never recovered. She is a
broken-hearted woman. She sees life as a dark riddle. She counts herself
as one of the entombed."

"Dear me," Gregory murmured.

Miss Scrotton glanced at him with some sharpness; but finding his blue
eyes fixed abstractedly on Karen Woodruff exonerated him from intending
to be disagreeable. "Her childlessness has been a final grief," she
added; "a child, as she has often told me, would be a resurrection from
the dead."

"And the little girl?" Gregory inquired. "Is she any solace? What is the
exact relationship? I hear that she calls her Tante."

"The right to call her Tante is one of Mercedes's gifts to her. She is
no relation at all. Mercedes picked her up, literally from the roadside.
She is twenty-four, you know; not a child."

"So the story is true, about the Norwegian peasants and the forest?"

"I have to contradict that story at least twice a day," said Miss
Scrotton with a smile half indulgent and half weary. "It is true that
Karen was found in a forest, but it was the forest of Fontainebleau,
_tout simplement_; and it is true that she has Norwegian blood; her
mother was a Norwegian; she was the wife of a Norwegian artist in Rome,
and there Karen's father, an American, a sculptor of some talent, I
believe, met her and ran away with her. They were never married. They
lived on chestnuts up among the mountains in Tuscany, I believe, and the
mother died when Karen was a little child and the father when she was
twelve. Some relatives of the father's put her in a convent school in
Paris and she ran away from it and Mercedes found her on the verge of
starvation in the forest of Fontainebleau. The Baron von Marwitz had
known Mr. Woodruff in Rome and Mercedes persuaded him to take the child
into their lives. She hadn't a friend or a penny in the world. The
father's relatives were delighted to be rid of her and Mercedes has had
her on her hands ever since. That is the true story."

"Isn't she fond of her?" Gregory asked.

"Yes, she is fond of h