"Oh, I beg your pardon!" said the young man, contritely. "I forgot. One
ought to introduce one's self before rescuing ladies in distress--but there
really wasn't time, you know. If you'll overlook the informality, my name's
Karslake, Roger Karslake, Princess Sofia, and I'm taking you to your
father."

V

HOUSE OF THE WOLF

This startling announcement Sofia received without comment and with a
composure quite as surprising. The life which had made her what she was, a
young woman singularly unillusioned, well-poised, and well-informed, had
brought out in her nature a strong vein of scepticism. She was not easily
to be impressed. The more remarkable the circumstance in question, the less
inclined was she to exclaim about it, the stronger was her propensity to
look shrewdly into the matter and find out for herself just what it was
that made it seem so odd.

She didn't repose much faith in those striking synchronizations which
apparently unrelated influences sometimes effect with related events, and
which we are accustomed to term coincidences. She distrusted their specious
seeming of spontaneity, she suspected a deep design behind them all.

For example: Up to the moment of her flight from the Cafe des Exiles there
had been, as Sofia saw it, nothing extraordinary or inexplicable in the
chapter of happenings which had made her acquainted, as abruptly as
tardily, with certain facts concerning her parentage.

You might, if you felt like it, call it a strange coincidence that she
should have read the advertisement of Messrs. Secretan & Sypher just before
their letter was delivered and Mama Therese by her intemperate conduct
warmed Sofia's simmering suspicions to the boiling point. But then Sofia
read the Agony Column every time it came into her hands: she would have
been more surprised had she missed noticing her given name in print, and
downright ashamed of herself if she had failed to associate the letter with
the advertisement.

If you asked her, she called it Fate, the foreordained workings of occult
forces charged with dominion over human affairs. Sooner or later she must
somehow have learned the truth about her right place in the world; and to
her way of thinking it was no more astonishing that she should have learned
it through accident supplemented by the acute inferences of a sharply
stimulated imagination, rather than through being waited upon by a
delegation of legal gentlemen commissioned with the dut