around her stirred with re-created dead emotions. Then:

"Ah!" she cried softly, unexpectedly, "what a wonderful doll." She
rose, with a graceful gesture of her hands up to where Cytherea rested.
"Where did you get her? But that doesn't matter: do you suppose, would
it be possible for me, could I buy her?"

"I'm sorry," Lee answered promptly; "we can't do without her. She
belongs to Helena," he lied.

"But not to a child," Mina Raff protested, with what, in her, was
animation and color; "it has a wicked, irresistible beauty." She gazed
with a sudden flash of penetration at Lee Randon. "Are you sure it's
your daughter's?" she asked, once more repressed, negative. "Are you
quite certain it is not yours and you are in love with it?"

He laughed uncomfortably. "You seem to think I'm insane--"

"No," she replied, "but you might, perhaps, be about that." Her voice
was as impersonal as an oracle's. "You would be better off without her
in your house; she might easily ruin it. No common infidelity could be
half as dangerous. How blind women are--your wife would keep that about
and yet divorce you for kissing a servant. What did you call her?"

"Cytherea."

"I don't know what that means."

He told her, and she studied him in a brief masked appraisal. "Do you
know," she went on, "that I get four hundred letters a week from men;