“No, but I hear her moving around restlessly, and putting the window up and down – and Miss Bascom – her room’s cornerways on the ell, she says she sees her looking out the window late at night ’most every night.”
“Miss Bascom’s a meddling old maid, and I’d put her out of this house before I would the little girl.”
“Of course you would! You’re all set up because she makes so much of you – ”
“Oh, come now, Esther, you can’t say that child makes much of me! I wish she would. I’ve taken a fancy to her.”
“Yes, because she’s pretty – in a gipsy, witch-like fashion. What men see in a pair of big black eyes, and a dark, sallow face, I don’t know!”
“Not sallow,” Old Salt said, reflectively; “olive, rather – but not sallow.”
“Oh you!” exclaimed Mrs. Adams, and with that cryptic remark the subject was dropped.
Gordon Lockwood, secretary of John Waring, had a room at the Adams house. But as he took no meals there save his breakfasts, and as he ate those early, he had not yet met Anita Austin.
But one Saturday morning, he chanced to be late, and the two sat at table together.
An astute reader of humanity, Lockwood at once became interested in the girl, and realized that to win her attention he must not be eager or insistent.
He spoke only one or two of the merest commonplaces, until almost at the close of the meal, he said:
“Can I do anything for you, Miss Austin? If you would care to hear any of the College lectures, I can arrange it.”
“Who are the speakers?”
She turned her eyes fully upon him, and Gordon Lockwood marveled at their depth and beauty.
“Tonight,” he replied, “Doctor Waring is to lecture on Egyptian Archaeology. Are you interested in that?”
“Yes,” she said, “very much so. I’d like to go.”
“You certainly may, then. Just use this card.”
He took a card from his pocket, scribbled a line across it, and gave it to her. Without another word, he finished his breakfast, and with a mere courteous bow, he left the room.
Miss Austin’s face took on a more scrutable look than ever.
The card still in her hand, she went up to her room. Unheeding the maid, who was at her duties there, the girl threw herself into a big chair and sat staring at the card.
“The Egyptian Temples,” she said to herself, “Doctor John Waring.”
The maid looked at her curiously as she murmured the words half aloud, but Miss Austin paid no heed.
“Go on with your work, Nora, don’t mind me,” she said, at last, as the chambermaid paused inquiringly in front of her. “I don’t mind your being here until you finish what you have to do. And I wish you’d bring me a Corinth paper, please?’ There is one, isn’t there?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. Twice a week.”
Nora disappeared and returned with a paper.
“Mr. Adams says you may have this to keep. It’s the newest one.”
The girl took it and turned to find the College announcements. The Egyptian Lecture was mentioned, and in another column was a short article regarding Doctor Waring and a picture of him.
Long the girl looked at the picture, and when the maid, her tasks completed, left the room, she noticed Miss Austin still staring at the fine face of the President-elect of the University of Corinth.
After a time, she reached for a pair of scissors, and cut out the portrait and the article which it illustrated.
She put the clipping in a portfolio, which she then locked in her trunk, and the picture she placed on her dresser.
That night she went to the lecture. She went alone, for Gordon Lockwood did not reappear and no one else knew of her going.
“Shall I have a key, or will you be up?” she asked of Mrs. Adams, as she left the house.
“Oh, we’ll be up.” The round, shrewd eyes looked at her kindly. “You’re lucky to get a ticket. Doctor Waring’s lectures are crowded.”
“Good night,” said Miss Austin, and went away.
The lecture room was partly filled when she arrived, and her ticket entitled her to a seat near the front.
Being seated, she fell into a brown study, or, at least, sat motionless and apparently in deep thought.
Gordon Lockwood, already there, saw her come in, and after she was in her place, he quietly arose and went across the room, taking a seat directly behind her.
Of this she was quite unaware, and the student of human nature gave himself up to a scrutiny of the stranger.
He saw a little head, its mass of dark, almost black hair surmounted by a small turban shaped hat, of taupe colored velvet, with a curly ostrich tip nestling over one ear.
Not that her ears were visible, for Miss Austin was smartly groomed and her whole effect modish.
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