At first glance, the crouching girl upon the window seat seemed as nondescript as the room. Almost frighteningly fragile in her dark street dress, she would have been entirely insignificant if it had not been for the appalling misery of her eyes. They brimmed with the sorrowfulness of a kicked puppy. In their heavy-lidded gaze was mirrored the atavistic agony of womankind. Weary, all-revealing, they stared down upon the brilliant park below, while she listlessly stroked the bizarre head of a Brussels Griffon curled upon her skirts. It was the creature next to Alexis which she loved the best in the world, both because Alexis had bought it for her himself on a sudden boyish impulse, and because it loved her with all the devotion in its tiny body. And love was to Claire the food and drink for which her soul was starving. Not that she had ever been cruelly treated. Hers had been a negative sort of misery. When she was a child of six, her mother had died, leaving her in the charge of her aunt, Mme. Petrovskey, in whose boarding house they were then living. Of her father she knew nothing. But sometimes she suspected his official existence. All she knew was that her name was the same as that of her aunt before she had married Nicholas Petrovskey, that strange and exotic Russian musician, who had invaded the boarding house one day before she herself was born, and had never left it until his death several years later. How well she remembered that boarding house in old London. How scrupulously clean and unutterably dreary it had all been! And how well she remembered her aunt's foreign husband who filled the house from morning till night with the weird sobbings of his violin, until it almost seemed to her child's understanding that one were not in a London boarding house at all, but in an enchanted castle which continually bewailed its pristine glories. It was this music and the author of it which had supplied the only romance of a childhood singularly dull and colorless. And strange to say, the frail, emaciated figure of the musician stood out more clearly in her memory than that of his little boy Alexis, who had been her playmate ever since the beginning of things. It was not until several years later, when his father had died and Alexis was almost ten years old, that he had become the greatest interest and only affection of her lonely little life.