“No nonsense, Georgian,” opening and shutting his hands as he spoke, in curious gesticulations which her eye mechanically followed but which seemed to convey no meaning to her, though he evidently expected them to and looked surprised (Ransom almost thought baffled) when she shook her head and in a sweet, impassive way reiterated: 

“I cannot hear and I do not understand the deaf and dumb alphabet.  I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go to some one else.  I’m very unfortunate.  I have to mend this dress and I don’t know how.”

Hazen, who could hardly tear his eyes from her face, fell slowly back as she painfully and conscientiously returned to her task.  “Good God!” he murmured, as his eye sought Ransom’s.  “What a likeness!” Then he looked again at the girl, at the wave of her raven black hair breaking into little curls just above her ear; at the smooth forehead rendered so distinguished by the fine penciling of her arching brows; at the delicate nose with nostrils all alive to the beating of an over-anxious heart; at the mouth, touching in its melancholy so far beyond her years; and lastly at the strong young figure huddled on the little stool; and bending forward again, he uttered two or three quick sentences which Ransom could not catch.

His persistence, or the near approach of his face to hers, angered her.  Rising quickly to her feet, she vehemently cried out: 

“Go away from here.  It is not right to keep on talking to a deaf girl after she has told you she cannot hear you.”  Then catching sight of Ransom, who had advanced a step in his sympathy for her, she gave a little sigh of relief and added querulously: 

“Make this man go away.  This is the landlady’s room.  I don’t like to have strangers talk to me.  Besides—­” here her voice fell, but not so low as to be inaudible to the subject of her remark, “he’s not pretty.  I’ve seen enough of men and women who are—­”

At this point Ransom drew Hazen out into the hall.

“What do you think now?” he demanded.

Hazen did not reply.  The room they had just left seemed to possess a strange fascination for him.  He continued to look back at it as he preceded Ransom down the hall.  Ransom did not press his questions, but when they were on the point of separating at the head of the stairs, he held Hazen back with the words: 

“Let us come to some understanding.  Neither of us can desire to waste strength in wrong conclusions.  Can that woman be other than your own sister?”

“No.”  The denial was absolute.  “She is my sister.”

“Anitra?” emphasized Ransom.

The smile which he received in reply was strangely mirthless.

“I never rush to conclusions,” was Hazen’s remark after a moment of possibly mutual heart-beat and unsettling suspense.  “Ask me that same question to-morrow.  Perhaps by then I shall be able to answer you.”

CHAPTER XX