brow was high, and surmounted by a luscious wealth of glossy black hair which Bertram never remembered to have seen equalled before for its silkiness of texture and its strange blue sheen, like a plate of steel, or the grass of the prairies.  Gliding grace distinguished her when she walked.  Her motion was equable.  As once the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and straightway coveted them, even so Bertram Ingledew looked on Frida Monteith, and saw at the first glance she was a woman to be desired, a soul high-throned, very calm and beautiful.

She stood there for a moment and faced him, half in doubt, in her flowing Oriental or Mauresque robe (for she dressed, as Philip would have said, “artistically"), waiting to be introduced the while, and taking good heed, as she waited, of the handsome stranger.  As for Philip, he hesitated, not quite certain in his own mind on the point of etiquette—­say rather of morals—­whether one ought or ought not to introduce “the ladies of one’s family” to a casual stranger picked up in the street, who confesses he has come on a visit to England without a letter of introduction or even that irreducible minimum of respectability—­a portmanteau.  Frida, however, had no such scruples.  She saw the young man was good-looking and gentlemanly, and she turned to Philip with the hasty sort of glance that says as plainly as words could say it, “Now, then! introduce me.”

Thus mutely exhorted, though with a visible effort, Philip murmured half inarticulately, in a stifled undertone, “My sister, Mrs. Monteith—­Mr. Bertram Ingledew,” and then trembled inwardly.

It was a surprise to Bertram that the beautiful woman with the soul in her eyes should turn out to be the sister of the very commonplace young man with the boiled-fish expression he had met by the corner; but he disguised his astonishment, and only interjected, as if it were the most natural remark in the world:  “I’m pleased to meet you.  What a lovely gown! and how admirably it becomes you!”

Philip opened his eyes aghast.  But Frida glanced down at the dress with a glance of approbation.  The stranger’s frankness, though quaint, was really refreshing.

“I’m so glad you like it,” she said, taking the compliment with quiet dignity, as simply as it was intended.  “It’s all my own taste; I chose the stuff and designed the make of it.  And I know who this is, Phil, without your troubling to tell me; it’s the gentleman you met in the street last night, and were talking about at dinner.”

“You’re quite right,” Philip answered, with a deprecating look (as who should say, aside, “I really couldn’t help it").  “He—­he’s rather in a difficulty.”  And then he went on to explain in a few hurried words to Frida, with sundry shrugs and nods of profoundest import, that the supposed lunatic or murderer or foreigner or fool had gone to Miss Blake’s without luggage of any sort; and that, “Perhaps”—­very dubitatively—­“a portmanteau or bag might help him out of his temporary difficulties.”