"Oh yes, she's that all right. I have never seen anybody so lovely." Mrs. Spash made a swift conversational pounce. "I thought you said you'd never seen her." Lindsay flushed abjectly. "No," he admitted. "But you see I have a picture of her." He pointed to the mantel. "Yes, I noticed that when I came in to get some water." Strangely enough Mrs. Spash did not, for a moment, look at the picture. Instead she stared at Lindsay. Lindsay submitted easily enough to this examination. After a while Mrs. Spash appeared to abandon her scrutiny of him. She trotted over to the fireplace; studied Lutetia's likeness. "I don't know as I ever see that one--it don't half do her justice--I hate a profile picture--" She pronounced "profile" to rhyme with "wood-pile." "None of her pictures ever did do her justice. Her beauty was mostly in her hair and her eyes. She had a beautiful skin too, though she never took no care of it. Never wore a hat--no matter how hot the sun was. And then her expression-- Well, it was just beautiful--changing all the time." Lindsay was only half listening. He was, with an amused glint in his eyes, studying Mrs. Spash's spare, erect black-silk figure. She was a relic perfectly preserved, he reflected, of mid-Victorianism. Her black was of the kind that is accurately described by the word decent. And she wore fittingly a little black, beaded cape with a black shade-hat that tilted forward over her face at a decided slant. Her straight, white, abundant hair was apparently parted in the middle under her hat. At any rate, the neat white parting continued over the crown of her head to her very neck, where it concealed itself under a flat black-silk bow. Her gnarled, blue-veined hands had been covered with the lace mitts that now lay on the table. Her little wrinkled face was neat-featured. The irises of her eyes were a faded blue and the whites were blue also; and this put a note of youthful color among her wrinkles. But Lindsay lost interest in these details; for, obviously, a new idea caught him in its instant clutch. "Oh, Mrs. Spash," he suggested, "would you be so good as to take me through this house? I want you to tell me who occupied the rooms. This is not mere idle curiosity on my part. You see Miss Murray's publishers have decided to bring out a new edition of her works. They want me to write a life of Miss Murray. I'm asking everybody who knows anything about her all kinds of questions." Mrs. Spash received all this with that unstirred composure which indicates non-comprehension of the main issue. "Of course I'm interested on my own account too," Lindsay went on. "She's such a wonderful creature, so charming and so beautiful, so sweet, so unbearably poignant and sad. I can't understand," he concluded absently, "why she is so sad."