which a doctor may know as little of as a
hurdy-gurdy player of the essence of those divine musical mysteries. The
Doctor knew the difference between what men say and what they mean as
well as most people. When he was listening to common talk, he was in the
habit of looking over his spectacles; if he lifted his head so as to look
through them at the person talking, he was busier with that person's
thoughts than with his words.

Jefferson Buck was not bold enough to confront the Doctor with Miss
Susy's question, for he did not look as if he were in the mood to answer
queries put by curious young people. His eyes were fixed steadily on the
dark girl, every movement of whom he seemed to follow.

She was, indeed, an apparition of wild beauty, so unlike the girls about
her that it seemed nothing more than natural, that, when she moved, the
groups should part to let her pass through them, and that she should
carry the centre of all looks and thoughts with her. She was dressed to
please her own fancy, evidently, with small regard to the modes declared
correct by the Rockland milliners and mantua-makers. Her heavy black
hair lay in a braided coil, with a long gold pin shat through it like a
javelin. Round her neck was a golden torque, a round, cord-like chain,
such as the Gaols used to wear; the "Dying Gladiator" has it. Her dress
was a grayish watered silk; her collar was pinned with a flashing diamond
brooch, the stones looking as fresh as morning dew-drops, but the silver
setting of the past generation; her arms were bare, round, but slender
rather than large, in keeping with her lithe round figure. On her wrists
she wore bracelets: one was a circlet of enamelled scales; the other
looked as if it might have been Cleopatra's asp, with its body turned to
gold and its, eyes to emeralds.

Her father--for Dudley Venner was her father--looked like a man of
culture and breeding, but melancholy and with a distracted air, as one
whose life had met some fatal cross or blight. He saluted hardly anybody
except his entertainers and the Doctor. One would have said, to look at
him, that he was not at the party by choice; and it was natural enough to
think, with Susy Pettingill, that it must have been a freak of the dark
girl's which brought him there, for he had the air of a shy and
sad-hearted recluse.

It was hard to say what could have brought Elsie Venner to the party.
Hardly anybody seemed to know her, and she seemed not