ld like to have a tiny eyebrow brush
with an ivory handle, such an one as she had seen among the toilet
articles on her mistress's dressing-table. Then she glanced at the
ring on her finger which Emmet had given her, and for a while she
forgot everything else, fixed in contemplation.

The ring was one whose peculiar value Lena was far from realising: a
Maltese cross of old gold, set with four uncut emeralds. Seen by
gaslight the stones lacked brilliancy, and she thought the ring itself
awkward and heavy. From the first she had regarded the gift
superstitiously, as if the dull green stones, like four dull eyes,
emitted a baleful influence. It was significant of her utter lack of
religious associations that the cross itself suggested no counter
charm. Had she been a Catholic, that shape alone would have made the
ring a talisman, but her people were Congregationalists, to whom
religious symbols were anathema, and she herself had seldom gone to
church. In fact, Lena was vaguely disappointed in the ring, and even
ashamed of it. If her lover were as rich as he said, why had he not
bought her a diamond? But repentance followed hard upon this
questioning. The ring was not what she desired, but it was a pledge of
his love, and she raised it to her lips.

She was in this attitude, her thin, white shoulders glimmering bare, a
graceful and nymph-like figure, when a light tap at the door froze her
into immobility, and then she saw her mistress's face reflected in the
mirror. With a little cry of embarrassment, she turned and leaned
against the bureau, lifting one hand with that instinctive gesture
which Greek sculptors have immortalised in many a lovely statue.

"I did n't mean to frighten you, Lena," Miss Wycliffe said quietly,
when she had shut the door carefully behind her and taken a chair. "I
thought you might be ill, and came to see whether I could do anything
for you."

The words were kind, but there was something in the speaker's manner
that was less assuring. Her face was pale, and her eyes were bright,
but not with compassion. Confronting each other thus, they presented a
striking contrast. The mistress's dark, rich beauty made the other's
prettiness seem ephemeral, without reducing it to the level of the
commonplace; for Lena was not common as servants are, either in her
personality or in the atmosphere she created in her room. Even her
visitor, absorbed as she was in her own purpose, was not unconsciou