unintelligible—voice that ranged, with a remarkably operatic effect, through two full octaves.

Oliver stared. "I'm here to doctor the sick bear," he said.

"Oh, a native," the girl said in English.

Obviously she was trying to keep her voice within the tonal range of his own, but in spite of the effort it trilled distractingly up and down the scale in a fashion that left Oliver smitten with a sudden and unfamiliar weakness of the knees.

"May I help?" she said.

She might, Oliver replied. She could have had as readily, he might have added, a pint of his blood.

Many times while they worked, finding a suitable squeeze-cage and dragging it against the bear's larger cage so that the two doors coincided, Oliver found the prim and reproachful image of Miss Orella Simms rising to remind him of his obligations; but for the first time in his life an obligation was surprisingly easy to dismiss. His assistant's lively conversation, which was largely uninformative though fascinatingly musical, bemused him even to the point of shrugging off his Aunt Katisha's certain disapproval.

The young lady, it seemed, came from a foreign country whose name was utterly unpronounceable; Oliver gathered that she had not been long with Mr. Furnay, who was of another nationality, and that she was homesick for her native land—for its "saffron sun on turquoise hills and umber sea," which could only be poetic exaggeration or simple unfamiliarity with color terms of a newly learned language—and that she was as a consequence very lonely.

She was, incredibly, a trainer of animals.

"Not of such snarling fierce ones as yours," she said, with a little shiver for the polar bear watching them sullenly through the bars, "but of my own gentle beasts, who are friends."

Her name was a startling combination of soprano sounds that might have been written as Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above, but which Oliver was completely unable to manage.

"Would you mind," he asked, greatly daring, "if I called you Pearl instead?"

She would not. But apparently Mr. Furnay would.

he millionaire, who had entered the menagerie unheard, spoke sternly to the girl in his own raucous tongue and pointed a peremptory finger 

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