glance he directed towards her would have sufficed to chill him into
indifference. She was not young, and with prominent features and
puckered skin, was twisting her face into strange sentimental grimaces,
as if terribly overcome by the beauty and pathos of her own melodies.
To add to Vane's displeasure, she was dressed in a costume wholly
antagonistic to his views of the becoming,--in a Greek jacket of gold and
scarlet, contrasted by a Turkish turban.

Muttering "What she-mountebank have we here?" he sank into a chair behind
the door, and fell into an absorbed revery. From this he was aroused by
the cessation of the music and the hum of subdued approbation by which it
was followed. Above the hum swelled the imposing voice of M. Louvier as
he rose from a seat on the other side of the piano, by which his bulky
form had been partially concealed.

"Bravo! perfectly played! excellent! Can we not persuade your charming
young countrywoman to gratify us even by a single song?" Then turning
aside and addressing some one else invisible to Graham he said, "Does
that tyrannical doctor still compel you to silence, Mademoiselle?"

A voice so sweetly modulated that if there were any sarcasm in the words
it was lost in the softness of pathos, answered, "Nay, Monsieur Louvier,
he rather overtasks the words at my command in thankfulness to those who
like yourself, so kindly regard me as something else than a singer."

It was not the she-mountebank who thus spoke. Graham rose and looked
round with instinctive curiosity. He met the face that he said had
haunted him. She too had risen, standing near the piano, with one hand
tenderly resting on the she-mountebank's scarlet and gilded shoulder,--
the face that haunted him, and yet with a difference. There was a faint