St. George’s eyes blazed, but he did not lift them.  The affront was unstudied and, indeed, unconscious.  But Miss Holland understood how grave it was, for there are women whose intuition would tell them the etiquette due upon meeting the First Syndic of Andorra or a noble from Gambodia.

“We want the truth about this as much as Mr. St. George does,” she said quickly, smiling for the first time.  St. George liked her smile.  It was as if she were amused, not absent-minded nor yet a prey to the feminine immorality of ingratiation.  “Besides,” she continued, “I wish to know a great many things.  How did the mulatto woman impress you, Mr. St. George?”

Miss Holland loosened her coat, revealing a little flowery waist, and leaned forward with parted lips.  She was very beautiful, with the beauty of perfect, blooming, colourful youth, without line or shadow.  She was in the very noon of youth, but her eyes did not wander after the habit of youth; they were direct and steady and a bit critical, and she spoke slowly and with graceful sanity in a voice that was without nationality.  She might have been the cultivated English-speaking daughter of almost any land of high civilization, or she might have been its princess.  Her face showed her imaginative; her serene manner reassured one that she had not, in consequence, to pay the usury of lack of judgment; she seemed reflective, tender, and of a fine independence, tempered, however, by tradition and unerring taste.  Above all, she seemed alive, receptive, like a woman with ten senses.  And—­above all again—­she had charm.  Finally, St. George could talk with her; he did not analyze why; he only knew that this woman understood what he said in precisely the way that he said it, which is, perhaps, the fifth essence in nature.

“May I tell you?” asked St. George eagerly.  “She seemed to me a very wonderful woman, Miss Holland; almost a woman of another world.  She is not mulatto—­her features are quite classic; and she is not a fanatic or a mad-woman.  She is, of her race, a strangely superior creature, and I fancy, of high cultivation; and I am convinced that at the foundation of her attempt to take your life there is some tremendous secret.  I think we must find out what that is, first, for your own sake; next, because this is the sort of thing that is worth while.”

“Ah,” cried Miss Holland, “delightful.  I begin to be glad that it happened.  The police said that she was a great brutal negress, and I thought she must be insane.  The cloth-of-gold and the jewels did make me wonder, but I hardly believed that.”

“The newspapers,” Mr. Frothingham said acidly, “became very much involved in their statements concerning this matter.”

“This ‘Tabnit,’” said Miss Holland, and flashed a smile of pretty deference at the lawyer to console him for her total neglect of his comment, “in McDougle Street.  Who can he be?—­he is a man, I suppose.  And where is McDougle Street?”