She had removed her coat, which she held in her lap. Her frock was taupe colored, of a soft woolen material, ornamented with many small buttons. These tiny buttons formed two rows down her back, from either shoulder to the waist line, and they also formed a border round the sailor collar. They were, perhaps, Lockwood decided, little balls, rather than buttons, and he idly counted them as he sat watching her. He hoped she would turn her head a trifle, but she sat as motionless as a human being may. He marveled at her stillness, and impatiently waited for the lecture to begin that he might note her interest. At last Doctor Waring appeared on the platform, and as the applause resounded all over the room, Lockwood was almost startled to observe Miss Austin’s actions. She clasped her hands together as if she had received a sudden shock. She—if it hadn’t seemed too absurd,—he would have said that she trembled. At any rate she was a little agitated, and it was with an effort that she preserved her calm. No one else noticed her, and Lockwood would not have done so, save for his close watching. Throughout the lecture, Miss Austin’s gaze seemed never to leave the face of the speaker, and Lockwood marveled that Waring himself was not drawn to notice her. But Waring’s calm gaze, though it traveled over the audience, never rested definitely on any one face, and Lockwood concluded he recognized nobody. “Miss Mystery!” Gordon Lockwood said to himself. “I wonder who and what you are. Probably a complex nature, psychic and imaginative. You think it interesting to come up here and pretend to be a mystery. But you’re too young and too innocent to be—I’m not so sure of the innocent, though,—and as to youth,—well, I don’t believe you’re much older than you look any way. And you’re confoundedly pretty—beautiful, rather. You’ve too much in your face to call it merely pretty. I’ve never seen such possibilities of character. You’re either a deep one or your looks belie you.” Lockwood heard no word of the lecture, nor did he wish to; he had helped in the writing of it, and almost knew it by heart anyway. But he was really intrigued by this mysterious girl, and he determined to get to know her. He had been told, of course, of the futile attempts of the other boarders to make friends with her, but he had faith in his own attractiveness and in his methods of procedure. Pinky Payne, too, had told of the interview he had on the bridge. His account of the girl’s beauty and charm had first roused Lockwood’s interest, and now he was making a study of the whole situation. Idly he counted the buttons again. There were thirteen across the collar. The vertical rows he could not be sure of as the back of the seat cut off their view. “Thirteen,” he mused; “an unlucky number. And the poor child looks unlucky. There’s a sadness in her eyes that must mean something. Yet there’s more than sadness,—there’s a hint of cruelty,—a possibility of desperate deeds.”