"They!" Madame von Marwitz nearly shouted. "She was with a man! Last Saturday! Who was it? Describe him to me! Was he slender--with fair hair--dark eyes--the air of a poet?" She panted. And her aspect was so singular that Miss Beatrice, startled out of her professional readiness, failed to snap it. "Why no," said Mrs. Slifer, keeping her clue. "I shouldn't say a poetical looking man, should you, Maude? A fleshy man--very big and fleshy, and he was taking such good care of her and looked so kind of tender and worried that I concluded he was her husband. She looked like a very sick woman, Baroness." "Fleshy?" Madame von Marwitz repeated, and the word, in her moan, was almost graceful. "Fleshy, you say? An old man? A stout old man?" she held her hands distractedly pressed to her head. "What stout old man does Karen know? Is it a stranger she has met?" "No, he wasn't old. This was a young man, Baroness. He had--now let me see--his hair was sort of red--I remember noticing his hair; and he wore knee-pants and a soft hat with a feather in it and was very high coloured." "_Bon Dieu!_" Madame von Marwitz gasped. She had again, while Mrs. Slifer spoke, seized her by the arm as though afraid that she might escape her and she now gazed with a fixed gaze above Mrs. Slifer's head and through the absorbed Maude and Beatrice. "Red hair?--A large young man?--Was he clean shaven? Did he wear eyeglasses? Had he the face of a musician? Did he look like an Englishman--an English gentleman?" Mrs. Slifer, nodding earnest assent to the first questions, shook her head at the latter. "No, he didn't. What I said to Maude and Beatrice was that Mr. Jardine looked more German than English. He looked just like a German student, Baroness." "Franz Lippheim!" cried Madame von Marwitz. She sank back upon the seat from which she had risen, putting a hand before her eyes. Victor, at her knees, laid a paw upon her lap and whined an interrogative sympathy. The three American ladies gathered near and gazed in silence upon the great woman, and Beatrice, carefully adjusting her camera, again took a snap. The picture of Madame von Marwitz, with her hand before her eyes, her anxious dog at her knees, found its way into the American press and illustrated touchingly the story of the lost adopted child. Madame von Marwitz was not sorry when, among a batch of press-cuttings, she came across the photograph and saw that her most genuine emotion had been thus made public. She looked up at last, and the dizziness of untried and perilous freedom was in her eyes; but curious, now, of other objects, they took in, weighed and measured the little group before her; power grew in them, an upwelling of force and strategy. She smiled upon the Slifers and she rose.