s."

"A tragic one," said Palla in a voice so even that Helen presently
lifted her eyes from her sewing to read in her expression something
more than the mere words that this young girl had uttered. And saw a
still, pale face, sensitive and very lovely; and the needle flying
over a bandage no whiter than the hand that held it.

"It was a great shock to you--her death," said Helen.

"Yes."

"And--you were there at the time! How dreadful!"

Palla lifted her brown eyes: "I can't talk about it yet," she said so
simply that Helen's sixth sense, always alert for information from the
busy, invisible antennae, suddenly became convinced that there were no
more hidden depths to explore--no motives to suspect, no pretense to
expose.

Day after day she chose to seat herself between Palla and Leila Vance;
and the girl began to fascinate her.

There was no effort to please on Palla's part, other than that natural
one born of sweet-tempered consideration for everybody. There seemed
to be no pretence, no pose.

Such untroubled frankness, such unconscious candour were rather
difficult to believe in, yet Helen was now convinced that in Palla
these phenomena were quite genuine. And she began to understand more
clearly, as the week wore on, why her son might have had a hard time
of it with Palla Dumont before he returned to more familiar pastures,
where camouflage and not candour was the rule in the gay and endless
game of blind-man's buff.

"This girl," thought Helen Shotwell to herself, "could easily have
taken Jim away from Elorn Sharrow had she chosen to do so. There is no
doubt about her charm and her goodness. She certainly is a most
unusual girl."

But she did not say this to her only son. She did not even tell him
that she had met his girl in black. And Palla had not informed him;
she knew that; because the girl herself had told her that she had not
seen Jim for "a long, long time." It really was not nearly as long as
Palla seemed to consider it.

Helen lunched with Leila Vance one day. The former spoke pleasantly of
Palla.

"She's such a darling," said Mrs. Vance, "but the child worries me."

"Why?"

"Well, she's absorbed some ultra-modern Russian notions--socialistic
ones--rather shockingly radical. Can you imagine it in a girl who
began her novitiate as a Carmelite nun?"

Helen said: "She does not seem to have a tendency toward extremes."

"She has. That awful affair in Russia seemed to shock her from one