“I guess you’ll have to.” Mrs. Adams spoke a little crisply. “It’s a—a summons. You’ve got to come.” “Oh.” Miss Austin’s manner changed. “Well, I will, then. Wait till I bathe my face.” Mrs. Adams came in, closed the door and waited. She felt sorry for Miss Mystery, but she also felt suspicious of her. Perhaps the mystery would now be cleared up. The good woman was about to speak kindly to her strange boarder but as she watched, she lost the desire to help her. For, to Mrs. Adams’ primitive notions, the girl was doing dreadful things. Having bathed her tear-stained face, Miss Mystery proceeded to powder it lightly, and, horror of horrors, she added the merest flick of rouge to her pale cheeks. And not content with such baseness she stooped to further degradation and touched her pale lips with some heathenish contraption that made them just a little redder! No, Mrs. Adams had no sympathy for a girl who would do such awful things, and she waited in a grim and stony silence. Then Miss Mystery fluffed out her pretty dark hair a little more over her ears, settled her sailor collar, with its row of tiny buttons for trimming, and with a critical glance at her shoes, signified her readiness to go down stairs. Still in disapproving silence, Mrs. Adams marched by her side, and they went together to face the visitors. The attitude of the girl as she entered the room was a triumph of perfection. Her beauty, which usually needed no artificial aid, was striking, and her large dark eyes rested on each in turn with an air of innocent wonder, quickly followed by a pathetic, beseeching little smile that touched the heart of several auditors, even though they deemed it disingenuous. Maurice Trask, shrewd and calculating, sized her up, as he would have expressed it. And his sizing up was decidedly complimentary. So much so, in fact, that he almost concluded to take her part against all comers. “I’m for her,” he said to himself, “and yet,” he added, to the same confidant, “she’s nobody’s fool! That girl knows what she’s about—and by jingo, if she wanted to kill a man, she could kill him! I’ll say she could!” It was Miss Austin’s dress that caught every one’s eye. Not a person present, among the visitors, but wanted to say, “turn around—oh, do!” But the girl sank into a low chair beside Saltonstall Adams and quietly awaited developments. “May I present Mr. Trask,” Cray said, a little awkwardly, for it was not easy to be casual under the glance of those pathetic eyes. Anita bowed courteously if coldly, and then there was an embarrassing silence. “Well,” Trask remarked, at last, “you people are not very talkative, guess I’ll take the helm myself. Miss Austin, will you be good enough to get up and turn around?” The request was so simply made, that, almost without thinking of its strangeness, Anita did exactly as she was asked. Sure enough, there were two rows of buttons down the back of her bodice, and another row across the sailor collar.