d able to put all their cleverness into the
making of a pie or a match for their cousins. This woman was blue-eyed
and brown-haired, but she had none of the neat, wide-awake
self-possession of her class. She had a more childish expression, and
spoke with a more timid uncertainty, than even Lotty Beardsley, who was
still in the schoolroom. I called my host's attention to her and asked
who she was.

"It is the daughter of my cousin, General George Waring. You remember
him surely--of the Henrico branch of Warings?"

"Certainly. But he had only one child--Louisa; and I remember receiving
an invitation to her wedding years ago."

"Yes. This is Louisa. The wedding never took place. It's an odd story,"
he said, after a pause, "and the truth is, Floyd, I brought the girl
here while you were with us in the hope that you, with your legal
acumen, could solve the mystery that surrounds her. I'll give the facts
to you to-morrow--it's impossible to do it now. But tell me, in the mean
time, how she impresses you, looking at her as a lawyer would at a
client, or a--a prisoner on trial. Do you observe anything peculiar in
her face or manner?"

"I observed a very peculiar manner in all those about her--an effort at
cordiality in which they did not succeed; a certain constraint in look
and tone while speaking to her. I even saw it in yourself just now as
soon as you mentioned her name."

"You did? I'm sorry for that--exceedingly sorry!" anxiously. "I believe
in Louisa Waring's innocence as I do in that of my own child; and if I
thought she was hurt or neglected in this house---- But there's a cloud
on the girl, Floyd--that's a fact. It don't amount even to suspicion. If
it did, one could argue it down. But----Well, what do you make of
her--her face now?"

"It is not an especially clever face, nor one that indicates power of
any kind; not the face of a woman who of her own will would be the
heroine of any remarkable story. I should judge her to have been a few
years ago one of the sensible, light-hearted, sweet-tempered girls of
whom there are so many in Virginia; a nice housekeeper, and one who
would have made a tender wife and mother."

"Well, well? Nothing more?"

"Yes. She has not matured into womanhood as such girls do. She looks as
if her growth in every-day experiences had stopped years ago; that while
her body grew older her mind had halted, immature, incomplete. A great
grief might have had that effect, or the absorption