The girl who had caught Nick Carter’s eye was striking not alone because of her facial expression at that moment, but because of her remarkable grace and beauty. She was about nineteen, a pronounced blonde, with regular features, large, blue eyes, and a sensitive mouth, a pink-and-white complexion, an abundance of wavy, golden hair, crowning a shapely head, finely poised on a graceful, slender, yet well-developed figure, then clad in a navy-blue skirt and a dainty white waist. It was the expression on her fair face, however, that had riveted the detective’s attention, though he could see her only in part profile. Nick never had seen a look of more poignant anguish on a human face. The girl was pitched forward on her high chair, her hand grasping one of the plugs which she had pushed into the switchboard--and now seemed impelled to withdraw. That would have abruptly ended the conversation between the two persons whom she had brought into communication, and to whose intercourse she was listening. That she really was listening, listening as one might to the reading of one’s own death warrant, was painfully apparent. Her eyes seemed to be starting from her head, but with the wildly vacant expression of one horrified, one whose mind was elsewhere. Every vestige of color had left her cheeks. Her lips were gray and drawn, her graceful figure as motionless as if every nerve and muscle was as strained and tense as a bowstring. “Great Scott!” thought Nick, watching her. “To whom is she listening, and to what?” The girl suddenly withdrew the plug. Then, with a quick change of expression, with a look of heart-racking determination, she inserted it again, renewing the telephone connection. Then she listened again, ghastly and horrified, for nearly a minute--and then her head dropped to one shoulder as if her neck was hinged, her arm fell like that of a corpse, dragging the plug out of the switchboard, while her tense form relaxed and fell from the chair, dropping with a thud upon the floor beside it. Nick Carter had seen what was coming, and he already was on his way to the room, darting out of the manager’s office and through the adjoining corridor. He heard the screams of the frightened girls, when he entered, and, with quick discrimination, he turned to the least-alarmed one and said: “She has only fainted. Bring a glass of water. Be quick about it.” “Yes, sir.” The girl addressed ran to a near closet and obeyed him. Nick raised the prostrate girl a little, supporting her against his knee, and, with a wet handkerchief, he bathed her brow and cheeks, paying no attention to the fright and consternation of his observers. The girl revived in a very few moments. A low moan, as pathetic as the facial expression which had preceded her collapse, broke from her gray lips. Her eyelids fluttered spasmodically, then were raised, and she gazed up vacantly at the detective’s kindly face.