breast the girl wore a locket in which was enshrined a
miniature of her mother, while down her neck inside at the
back hung a daguerreotype of her father. She carried a
portrait of her grandmother up her sleeve and had pictures
of her cousins tucked inside her boot, while beneath her--
but enough, quite enough.

Of her father Gertrude knew even less. That he was a
high-born English gentleman who had lived as a wanderer in
many lands, this was all she knew. His only legacy to Gertrude
had been a Russian grammar, a Roumanian phrase-book, a
theodolite, and a work on mining engineering.

From her earliest infancy Gertrude had been brought up by
her aunt. Her aunt had carefully instructed her in Christian
principles. She had also taught her Mohammedanism to make
sure.

When Gertrude was seventeen her aunt had died of hydrophobia.

The circumstances were mysterious. There had called upon her
that day a strange bearded man in the costume of the Russians.
After he had left, Gertrude had found her aunt in a syncope
from which she passed into an apostrophe and never recovered.

To avoid scandal it was called hydrophobia. Gertrude was thus
thrown upon the world. What to do? That was the problem that
confronted her.

It was while musing one day upon her fate that Gertrude's eye