purpose, as obviously, to dry; and they were doing some incidental
gilding on their own account, leaving blots and splashes and
sporadic little round footprints on the hardwood floor.

The old-fashioned brass bell-handle upon the caller's right
drooped from its socket in a dead fag, but after comprehensive
manipulation on the part of the young man, and equal complaint
on its own, it was constrained to permit a dim tinkle remotely.
Somewhere in the interior a woman's voice, not young, sang a
repeated fragment of "Lead, Kindly Light," to the accompaniment
of a flapping dust-cloth, sounds which ceased upon a second
successful encounter with the bell. Ensued a silence, probably to
be interpreted as a period of whispered consultation out of range;
a younger voice called softly and urgently, "Laura!" and a
dark-eyed, dark-haired girl of something over twenty made her
appearance to Mr. Corliss.

At sight of her he instantly restored a thin gold card-case to the
pocket whence he was in the act of removing it. She looked at him
with only grave, impersonal inquiry; no appreciative invoice of
him was to be detected in her quiet eyes, which may have surprised
him, possibly the more because he was aware there was plenty of
appreciation in his own kindling glance. She was very white and
black, this lady. Tall, trim, clear, she looked cool in spite of
the black winter skirt she wore, an effect helped somewhat,
perhaps, by the crisp freshness of her white waist, with its
masculine collar and slim black tie, and undoubtedly by the even
and lustreless light ivory of her skin, against which the strong
black eyebrows and undulated black hair were lined with attractive
precision; but, most of all, that coolness was the emanation of
her undisturbed and tranquil eyes. They were not phlegmatic: a
continuing spark glowed far within them, not ardently, but
steadily and inscrutably, like the fixed stars in winter.

Mr. Valentine Corliss, of Paris and Naples, removed his
white-ribboned straw hat and bowed as no one had ever bowed in
that doorway. This most vivid salutation--accomplished by adding
something to a rather quick inclination of the body from the hips,
with the back and neck held straight expressed deference without
affecting or inviting cordiality. It was an elaborate little
formality of a kind fancifully called "foreign," and evidently
habitual to the performer.

It produced no outward effect upon the recipient. Such
self-contro