sudden physical contraction of the muscles of my hand—and I couldn’t control it.”

Mrs. Bates didn’t look satisfied, but she did not pursue the subject. Then the discussion of Anita was resumed.

“How did you like her looks, Doctor Waring?” Helen Peyton asked.

“I scarcely saw her,” was the quiet reply. “Did you all admire her?”

“Some of us did.” Mrs. Bates answered; “I do, for one. Did you ever see her before, John?”

Doctor Waring stared at the question.

“Never,” he declared. “How could I have done so?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure,” Mrs. Bates laughed. “I just had a sort of an impression—”

“No, dear, I never saw the girl before in my life,” Waring reasserted.

“And you need never want to see her again,” Robert Tyler informed him. “She’s sulky, silly and supercilious. She’s a mystery, they say, but I say she merely wants to be thought a mystery to make a little sensation. I can’t abide that sort.”

Helen Peyton heard this with undisguised satisfaction, for she had quite enough girls in her life to be jealous and envious of, without adding another to the list. Also, she especially wanted to retain the admiration of Robert Tyler, and was glad to know it was not newly endangered.

“Miss Austin is very beautiful,” Gordon Lockwood declared, in his usual way of summing up a discussion and announcing his own opinion as final. “Also, she is a mystery. I live in the same boarding house—”

“So do I,” put in Tyler, “and she snubs us both.”

“She hasn’t snubbed me,” said Lockwood, simply.

“Never mind, Oscar, she will!” returned Tyler, and then laughed immoderately at his own would-be wit.

CHAPTER V THE TRAGEDY

CHAPTER V

That same Sunday evening the Waring household dined alone. Oftener than not there were guests, but tonight there were only the two Peytons, Lockwood and John Waring himself.

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