"May I tell you?" asked St. George eagerly. "She seemed to me a very wonderful woman, Miss Holland; almost a woman of another world. She is not mulatto--her features are quite classic; and she is not a fanatic or a mad-woman. She is, of her race, a strangely superior creature, and I fancy, of high cultivation; and I am convinced that at the foundation of her attempt to take your life there is some tremendous secret. I think we must find out what that is, first, for your own sake; next, because this is the sort of thing that is worth while."
"Ah," cried Miss Holland, "delightful. I begin to be glad that it happened. The police said that she was a great brutal negress, and I thought she must be insane. The cloth-of-gold and the jewels did make me wonder, but I hardly believed that."
"The newspapers," Mr. Frothingham said acidly, "became very much involved in their statements concerning this matter."
"This 'Tabnit,'" said Miss Holland, and flashed a smile of pretty deference at the lawyer to console him for her total neglect of his comment, "in McDougle Street. Who can he be?--he is a man, I suppose. And where is McDougle Street?"
St. George explained the location, and Mrs. Hastings fretfully commented.
"I'm sure, Olivia," she said, "I think it is frightfully unwomanly in you--"
"To take so much interest in my own murder?" Miss Holland asked in amusement. "Aunt Dora, I'm going to do more: I suggest that you and Mr. Frothingham and I go with Mr. St. George to this address in McDougle Street--"
"My dear Olivia!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, "it's in the very heart of the Bowery--isn't it, Mr. St. John? And only think--"
It was as if Mrs. Hastings' frustrate words emerged in the fantastic guise of her facial changes.
"No, it isn't quite the Bowery, Mrs. Hastings," St. George explained, "though it won't look unlike."
"I wish I knew what Mr. Hastings would have done," his widow mourned, "he always said to me: 'Medora, do only the necessary thing.' Do you think this is the necessary thing--with all the frightful smells?"
"It is perfectly safe," ventured St. George, "is it not, Mr. Frothingham?"
Mr. Frothingham bowed and tried to make non-partisanship seem a tasteful resignation of his own will.
"I am at Mrs. Hastings' command," he said, waving both hands, once, from the wrist.
"You know the place is really only a few blocks from Washington Square," St. George submitted.
Mrs. Hastings brightened.
"Well, I have some friends in Washington Square," she said, "people whom I think a great deal of, and always have. If you really feel, Olivia--"