"The imagination of Mademoiselle," he would observe innocently, "invests things with a magic of its own. In short, she is a poet." Then he would laugh gently, and Ermengarde would shudder for his future, though she was not above suggesting to him themes similar to the results of a frog diet for Miss Boundrish's imagination to develop. So that _table d'hôte_ was sometimes the scene of some remarkable additions to human knowledge. To account for her various and invincible charms, speculation as to where Miss Boundrish had been dragged up was frequent and diverse. Yet her parents were there in attendance upon her, harmless, worthy people of the comfortable, Philistine, mid-middle class, the father rather deaf--he had registered her with two r's, because her mother insisted on the short o in Doris, and the man was too logical to leave his child with insufficient letters--the mother placidly content with the wildest utterances of her only child, and both well trained in the ways in which modern parents are expected to go. That no subject was too abstruse for Dorris's discussion, and that nothing could be spoken of upon which she was not quite as well informed as anyone present, or better, caused them no apparent surprise. But Miss Boundrish's father was a little deaf, and Miss Boundrish's mother once confided to the thin man that it was a little tiring to be the mother of an exceptionally gifted and accomplished child, and that a few days' visit to Nice, contemplated by Dorris, would afford her a welcome opportunity of taking a "much-needed" rest. "I should like," she sighed, "to have two solid days to do nothing in and to think nothing in--and," she added, after a pause, "to _fear_ nothing in." "So that one hopes the fair Dorris doesn't beat her," the thin man commented to Ermengarde, who thought her quite capable of it. But Agatha suggested that even Miss Boundrish's mother might not be quite insensible to the fury some of her little ways evoked from the community; that pretty little way of drawing up a chair or of walking up and stopping dead for the express purpose of breaking into intimate or interesting dialogue, that even prettier way of pursuing people bent on solitude, dual or otherwise, to pleasant points of view, and pouring out entirely familiar, guide-book information. As, for instance, when the setting sun brought the craggy peaks that wall the high hill-village of St. Agnes into unusual beauty, and a party coming home from an excursion and another drawn out to the mountain from the hotel, stood silently enjoying it, and Dorris's high voice suddenly rang over the gorge with the history of the walled hill-villages, of the abduction of the innocent young Agnes by Saracens in one of their raids, and of the miracle wrought by her faith, which resulted in the conversion of many, the restoration of St. Agnes to her home among the crags, and a yearly commemoration of the event to this day by a procession of villagers.