r Mrs. Slifer collected her wits, a bent forefinger at
her lips. "To-day's Thursday and we got to Mullion yesterday--and we
stopped at Winchester for a day and night on our way to the New Forest,
it was on Saturday last of course. We'd been having a drive about that
part of the forest and we were taking the train and they had just come
and we saw them on the opposite platform. He was just helping her out of
the train and we didn't have any time to go round and speak to them--"

"They!" Madame von Marwitz nearly shouted. "She was with a man! Last
Saturday! Who was it? Describe him to me! Was he slender--with fair
hair--dark eyes--the air of a poet?" She panted. And her aspect was so
singular that Miss Beatrice, startled out of her professional readiness,
failed to snap it.

"Why no," said Mrs. Slifer, keeping her clue. "I shouldn't say a
poetical looking man, should you, Maude? A fleshy man--very big and
fleshy, and he was taking such good care of her and looked so kind of
tender and worried that I concluded he was her husband. She looked like
a very sick woman, Baroness."

"Fleshy?" Madame von Marwitz repeated, and the word, in her moan, was
almost graceful. "Fleshy, you say? An old man? A stout old man?" she
held her hands distractedly pressed to her head. "What stout old man
does Karen know? Is it a stranger she has met?"

"No, he wasn't old. This was a young man, Baroness. He had--now let me
see--his hair was sort of red--I remember noticing his hair; and he wore
knee-pants and a soft hat with a feather in it and was very high
coloured."

"_Bon Dieu!_" Madame von Marwitz gasped. She had again, while Mrs.
Slifer spoke, seized her by the arm as though afraid that she might
escape her and she now gazed with a fixed gaze above Mrs. Slifer's head
and through the absorbed Maude and Beatrice. "Red hair?--A large young
man?--Was he clean shaven? Did he wear eyeglasses? Had he the face of a
musician? Did he look like an Englishman--an English gentleman?"

Mrs. Slifer, nodding earnest assent to the first questions, shook her
head at the latter. "No, he didn't. What I said to Maude and Beatrice
was that Mr. Jardine looked more German than English. He looked just
like a German student, Baroness."

"Franz Lippheim!" cried Madame von Marwitz. She sank back upon the seat
from which she had risen, putting a hand before her eyes.

Victor, at her knees, laid a paw upon her lap and whined an
interrogative sympathy. The three A