Idiotic words, especially as obviously she couldn't understand them. His hand went to her shoulder. Perhaps she was badly hurt.... He must get her into the house.... But at his touch she twitched loose. She was staring past him now to where the moonlight glistened on the rippling little lily pool. Then she darted away; and at the pool knelt down, plunging her face, drinking deeply, greedily as one drinks who has been much loo long without water.... * * * * * It was several weeks before Professor Carter, Alice and George had any clear idea of who the strange, weirdly beautiful young girl might be, or where she had come from. Her name, which almost at once she was able to indicate to them, sounded as though it might be Lea--a limpid syllable as near that as they could determine. Professor Carter had told no one in the quiet little New England village about her. For the first few days, vaguely it had seemed that from some distant place a hue and cry would be raised for her; news that such a girl had escaped from some asylum, circus or Heaven knows what. But nothing developed. No such girl seemed missing. It confirmed George and his father's own conviction; incredibly this timid, new little inmate of the prosaic Carter household was of a race so far unknown. "Why, look at her, George," Professor Carter had exclaimed that first evening. "That complexion, creamy, ivory-tinted--perfect for an earth-girl. But don't you see that glow of opalescence in it? God, that's weird, unnatural, unexplainable. And look at the shape of her skull--not our shape. Not Neanderthal. I'd call it perhaps more in the line of Cro-Magnon. Yet hardly that either. My guess is that the skeleton formation, particularly the skull, certainly in many ways represents a development different from ours." Professor Carter was scientifically enthusiastic, amazed and thrilled by this mysterious specimen of living young female so miraculously here for him to study. George's father was a stocky, thick-set man of nearly sixty, square-rigged like a brig. His face was solid, heavily lined from almost a constant habit of grimness. He had a sunburned baldspot with a fringe of iron-gray hair. There was nothing of the dreamer, the romanticist in the practical scientific nature of Professor Carter--save that to him, everything scientific was the essence of romance. His deep-set gray eyes were sparkling with earnestness as he regarded the queerly beautiful little Lea. "A primitive race, George. And yet, look at her expression. Those delicately chiseled features. She has artistic feeling--a mentality different from ours, but perhaps in some ways even more advanced." To young Carter, the classification was repugnant, as though this frightened, wild little creature were a bug under a microscope. And Alice evidently felt the same. "Father, stop it!" she exclaimed. "Don't boom at her like that. She's still too frightened."