"I called to see you at the office of the _Daily Gazette_, Mr. Mordan, and this was the only address of yours they could give me, or I should have hesitated about intruding on you in working hours. I bring you an introduction from John Crondall." And with that she handed me a letter in Crondall's writing, and nodded in a friendly way when I asked permission to read it at once. "Please do," she said. She had no particular accent, but yet her speech differed slightly from that of the conventional Englishwoman of her class--the refined and well-educated Englishwoman, that is. I suppose the difference was rather one of expression, tone, and choice of phrase than a matter of accent. I doubt if one could easily find an example of it nowadays, increased communication having so much broadened our own colloquial diction that many of its conventional peculiarities have disappeared. But it existed then, and after a time I learned to place it as characteristic of the speech of Greater Britain, as distinguished from the English of those of us who lived always in this capital centre of the Empire. [Illustration: "RIVERS USHERED IN MISS CONSTANCE GREY"] Miss Grey had the Colonial directness and vividness of speech; a larger, freer diction upon the whole than that of the Londoner born and bred; more racy, less clipped and formal, but, in certain ways, more correct. The society _cliche_, and the society fads of abbreviation and accent, were missing; and in their place was an easy, idiomatic directness, distinctly noticeable to a man like myself who had actually never been out of England. This it was that first struck me about Miss Grey; this and the warm brilliance of her eyes: a graphic, moving speech, a frank, compelling gaze; both indicative, as it seemed to me, of broadly sympathetic understanding. I read John Crondall's kindly letter with a good deal of interest, moved by the fact that his terse, friendly phrases recalled to me a phase of my own life which, though no more than a couple of years past, seemed to me wonderfully remote. I had been new to London and to Fleet Street then, full of aspirations, of earnestness, of independent aims and hopes; fresh from the University and the more leisured days of my life as the son of the rector of Tarn Regis. I had had glimpses of much that was sordid and squalid in London life, at the period John Crondall's letter recalled, but as yet there had been no sordidness in my own life. All that was far otherwise now, I felt. Cambridge and Dorset were a long way from the office of _The Mass_. I thought of the greasy Teuton nondescript for whom I had kept Miss Grey waiting, and I felt colour rise in my face as I read John Crondall's letter: