The personage knew her father—­everyone did—­and the wonder had always been that she dared run the risk of displeasing one so implacable.  Though she was his favourite child, Peter Strange was known to be quite capable of cutting her off with a shilling, once his close, prejudiced mind conceived it to be his duty.  And that he would so interpret the situation, if he ever came to learn the secret of his daughter’s fits of abstraction and the sly bank account she was slowly accumulating, the personage holding out this dangerous lure had no doubt at all.  Yet he only smiled at her words and remarked in casual suggestion: 

“It’s out of town this time—­’way out.  Your health certainly demands a change of air.”

“My health is good.  Fortunately, or unfortunately, as one may choose to look at it, it furnishes me with no excuse for an outing,” she steadily retorted, turning her back on the table.

“Ah, excuse me!” the insidious voice apologized, “your paleness misled me.  Surely a night or two’s change might be beneficial.”

She gave him a quick side look, and began to adjust her boa.

To this hint he paid no attention.

“The affair is quite out of the ordinary,” he pursued in the tone of one rehearsing a part.  But there he stopped.  For some reason, not altogether apparent to the masculine mind, the pin of flashing stones (real stones) which held her hat in place had to be taken out and thrust back again, not once, but twice.  It was to watch this performance he had paused.  When he was ready to proceed, he took the musing tone of one marshalling facts for another’s enlightenment: 

“A woman of unknown instincts—­”

“Pshaw!” The end of the pin would strike against the comb holding Violet’s chestnut-coloured locks.

“Living in a house as mysterious as the secret it contains.  But—­” here he allowed his patience apparently to forsake him, “I will bore you no longer.  Go to your teas and balls; I will struggle with my dark affairs alone.”

His hand went to the packet of papers she affected so ostentatiously to despise.  He could be as nonchalant as she.  But he did not lift them; he let them lie.  Yet the young heiress had not made a movement or even turned the slightest glance his way.

“A woman difficult to understand!  A mysterious house—­possibly a mysterious crime!”

Thus Violet kept repeating in silent self-communion, as flushed with dancing she sat that evening in a highly-scented conservatory, dividing her attention between the compliments of her partner and the splash of a fountain bubbling in the heart of this mass of tropical foliage; and when some hours later she sat down in her chintz-furnished bedroom for a few minutes’ thought before retiring, it was to draw from a little oak box at her elbow the half-dozen or so folded sheets of closely written paper which had been left for her perusal by her persistent employer.