g figure before the
girl like the cloud in the Hebraic Myth.

The girl stood up and linked her fingers together behind her back. If
her father were only here--for an hour, for a moment! Or if, in the
world beyond sight and hearing, he could somehow get a message to her!

At this moment a bell, somewhere in the deeps of the house, jangled, and
she heard the old butler moving through the hall to the door. The
other servants had been dismissed for the night, and her aunt on the
preliminaries of this marriage was in Paris.

A moment later the butler appeared with a card on his tray. It was
a card newly engraved in some English shop and bore the name "Dr.
Tsan-Sgam." The girl stood for a moment puzzled at the queer name, and
then the memory of the strange outlandish human creatures, from the ends
of the world, who used sometimes to visit her father, in the old time,
returned, and with it there came a sudden upward sweep of the heart--was
there an answer to her longing, somehow, incredibly on the way!

She gave a direction for the visitor to be brought in. He was a big
old man. His body looked long and muscular like that of some type
of Englishmen, but his head and his features were Mongolian. He was
entirely bald, as bald as the palm of a hand, as though bald from
his mother he had so remained to this incredible age. And age was the
impression that he profoundly presented. But it was age that a tough
vitality in the man resisted; as though the assault of time wore it down
slowly and with almost an imperceptible detritus. The great naked head
and the wide Mongolian face were unshrunken; they presented, rather, the
aspect of some old child. He was dressed with extreme care, in the very
best evening clothes that one could buy in a London shop.

He bowed, oddly, with a slow doubling of the body, and when he spoke
the girl felt that he was translating his words through more than one
language; as though one were to put one's sentences into French or
Italian and from that, as a sort of intermediary, into English--as
though the way were long, and unfamiliar from the medium in which the
man thought to the one in which he was undertaking to express it. But at
the end of this involved mental process his English sentences appeared
correctly, and with an accurate selection in the words.

"You must pardon the hour, Miss Carstair," he said, in his slow, precise
articulation, "but I am required to see you and it is the only time I
hav