assage,
apologized, and confided in her. As usual she was sorry for him.

"I'm afraid we haven't many books; but you'll find some of mine in
here." She opened a door as she spoke, and passed on.

Durant found himself in a room which he had not yet investigated.
It was somewhat bare as to furniture; it struck strange to his
senses as if he had stumbled into another world; in some occult
way it preserved a tradition of travel and adventure. The bookcase
he came to inspect was flanked by a small cabinet of coins and
curios--Italian, Grecian, Egyptian, and Japanese; the walls were
hung with bad landscapes interspersed with maps.

One of these, an uncolored map of Europe, attracted his attention.
It was drawn by hand in Indian ink, a red line and accompanying
arrow heads followed the coast and strung together such inland
places as were marked upon the blank. The line started from
Southampton and reached the Mediterranean by the Bay of Biscay; it
shot inland to the great cities of Italy, returning always to the
sea. It skirted Greece, wound in and out of the Ionian islands,
touched at Constantinople, ringed the Bosporus and the Black Sea,
wheeled to Moscow and St. Petersburg, and then swept wildly up the
north of Russia to Archangel and the Arctic Ocean; thence it
followed the Scandinavian coast-line, darted to Iceland, and dipped
southward again to Britain by way of the Hebrides. Off Queenstown
the arrowheads pointed west, winged for the Atlantic. He found the
same red line again on a blank map of Asia heading for India by
China and Japan. An adventurous, erratic line, whose stages were now
the capitals of the world, and now some unknown halting-place in the
immeasurable waste. And what on earth did it mean? Was it the record
of an actual journey, or some yet untraveled visionary route?

But it was not these things alone that gave the room its fantastic
and alien air. What dominated the place was the portrait of a woman,
a woman who had Frida's queer accented eyebrows and Frida's eyes,
with some more fiery and penetrating quality of her own, something
more inimitably fine and foreign. The portrait (which struck Durant
as decidedly clever) was signed by some unknown Russian artist, and
he recognized it as that of Frida's mother, the lady of the
landscapes. He wondered if it was the demon of _ennui_ that had
driven poor Mrs. Tancred to the practice of her terrible art, if she
had had a spite against Coton Manor, which she