s, and
discovered that she had been seated in a low chair by the window. She
rose with a slow grace. There was something indefinably tragic and
foreordained about her every movement. Maisie's name for her flashed
into his mind, "The Princess Czarina Bolsheviki." It suited her exactly.
In those surroundings she might have posed as Mary Queen of Scots in
prison--a queen without a kingdom whose pride was unbroken. In the
dimness his first impression was of her queenly gentleness.

"I can guess why you've come."

The same deep voice that had taunted him at Maisie's, only now it was no
longer taunting! He noticed the way she offered him her hand, with the
arm fully extended as if to hold him away from her. She was a smaller
woman than he had remembered; it was the courage of her bearing that had
made her seem taller. He could not see her face distinctly; it was in
shadow. But, when she turned, he caught the whiteness of her profile on
the dusk, clear-cut and tranquil as a cameo. After having gazed so long
at Sargent's painting, he would have recognized anywhere the rounded
shapeliness of her head, the hair swept smoothly back from the calm
forehead, the splendid strength of her throat and the delicate, wholly
feminine half-moon of her shoulders.

"Won't you sit over here? If you would prefer it, we can have more
lamps. But they would spoil----" She indicated the vague stretch of
country, across which mists were drifting like gray ghosts.

He drew up a chair at an angle to her own, so that he could study her.
"You say you think you know why I've come?"

"I was expecting you," she said quietly. He could feel rather than see
the steady kindness that was in her stone-gray eyes.

"If you were expecting me, then your sister must have----"

"My sister had nothing to do with my expecting. Can't you think of any
one closer?"

He shook his head. At first he had hoped that Maisie had told her and
done his work for him. Evidently it wasn't that. She was attributing
some other motive to his visit. It was a motive the disclosure of which
called for delicacy. She had prearranged his reception. It was no
accident that had caused him to find her alone in the dimness of the
gathering evening. The scanty lighting of the shadowy room had been
stage-set to spare them both embarrassment. "If it wasn't your
sister----" He paused at a loss to know how to proceed further.

Her hands came together gently in her lap. When she spoke, her emot