"We have every confidence in you, Mr. Byrne," said Gerald, earnestly, "and we are both satisfied that the case could not have been entrusted into more capable hands than yours." While Gerald was speaking, a door that led to an inner room was opened, and Miriam Byrne came in. Byrne rose, laid one hand on the region of his heart, and waved the other gracefully. "My daughter, Mr. Warburton--my only child," he said. "I am glad that you have called to see us, Mr. Warburton," said Miriam, frankly, in her rich, full voice. "My father has talked so much about you that my curiosity was quite piqued to see for myself what his rara avis was like." "You will find that I am a bird of very homely plumage," replied Gerald, with a smile. "Your father has been drawing on a too lively imagination. I am afraid that his rara avis will prove to be nothing more wonderful than our familiar friend--the goose." "What a superb creature!" was Gerald's thought, as he sat down opposite Miriam; and that was the right phrase to apply to her. Miss Byrne was at this time close upon her twenty-second birthday. Her beauty was of an altogether eastern type. Hardly anyone who met Miriam in the street took her to be an English girl; while to those who knew both her and her father, it was a constant source of wonder how "old Peter" could come to have for his daughter a girl so totally unlike him in every possible way. But Byrne's wife, who died when her daughter was quite an infant, had been a beautiful woman, and Miriam more than inherited her mother's good looks. People knowing the family averred that she was an exact counterpart of her grandmother: a lovely Roumanian Jewess, who had been brought over to England in the train of an Austrian lady of rank, and having found a husband here, had never gone back. Eyes and hair of the black-set had Miriam Byrne. Large, liquid eyes, shaded with long, black lashes, and arched with delicate, well-defined brows; hair that fell in a thick, heavy mass to her very waist. Tints of the damask rose glowed through the dusky clearness of her cheeks. Her forehead was low and broad as that of some antique Venus. Her mouth was ripe and full, and might have looked somewhat coarse, had it not been relieved by her finely-cut nose with its delicate nostrils. She had on, this evening, a long, trailing dress of violet velvet, which harmonized admirably with her dusky loveliness--a rich, heavy-looking dress by gaslight, but one which daylight would have shown to be faded and frayed in many places. It had, in fact, at one time been a stage-dress, and as such, had been worn by Miss Kesteven of the Royal Westminster Theatre, when playing the heroine of one of Sardou's clever dramas.