It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside--the accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even now be brooding and twining vampirically around an artist's skeleton in a lime-packed grave beneath a charred foundation--was faintly, subtly, yet unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe's most primal grovelers. No wonder she owned a link with the old witchwoman Sophonisba--for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a loathsome, bestial thing, and her forebears had come from Africa.