ll
ranged themselves together to procure her the much desired engagement.

"I made up my mind to get taken on," she concluded. "_Et me voila_! I
did all sorts of desperate jumps that day. I felt desperate. If I
hadn't got it, there was only the Morgue. I couldn't have gone home."

Emile listened in silence, and drank _absinthe_ and considered.

That night at a meeting of the Brotherhood he took the leader,
Sobrenski, aside and said:

"It was decided the other day that we wanted someone to take messages
and run errands. Someone who could go unnoticed into places where it
would be suspicious for us to be seen. You suggested a boy. Fate has
been so kind as to show me a woman who seems to be in every way
suitable--or at least with a little training she will become so."

"A woman!" echoed the other. "Are you mad?"

"I conclude her to be a woman because of her clothes. Otherwise she
seems to be a mixture of a boy and wood-elf. The combination appears
to me to be a fascinating one. She is of good family, half Irish,
speaks three languages, asks no questions, and seems to have an
extraordinary capacity for holding her tongue. It is on that account
that I questioned her sex. Her appearance is excessively feminine. Of
course I do not propose to enrol her among us at once. As I have said
before, there are many ways in which a woman would be useful."

Sobrenski pulled doubtfully at his reddish, pointed beard. "Does she
know anything about the Cause?"

"I fancy not, but she appears to have the right ideas, and after I have
judiciously fanned the flame!--girls of that age are always wildly
enthusiastic over something--so she may as well devote her enthusiasm
to us."

CHAPTER III

"Out of the uttermost end of things
On the side of life that is seamier,
There lies a land, so its poet sings,
Whose people call it Bohemia.

"It is not old, it is not new,
It is not false, it is not true,
And they will not answer for what they do,
Far away in Bohemia."
"Love in Bohemia," DOLF WYLLARDE.

"I think," Arithelli said with deliberation, "that all your friends are
very fatiguing. They have such bad tempers, and do nothing but argue."

"They live for the serious things of life," retorted Emile. "Not to
play the fool."

"Thanks! Is this one of the serious things of life, do you suppose?"
She stuck the large needle with which she had been awkwardly cobbling a
tear in