"I do," said Miss Holland simply, "and let us go now, Aunt Dora. The brougham has been at the door since I came in. We may as well drive there as anywhere, if Mr. St. George is willing."
"I shall be happy," said St. George sedately, longing to cry: "Willing! Willing! Oh, Mrs. Hastings and Miss Holland--willing!"
Miss Holland and St. George and the lawyer were alone for a few minutes while Mrs. Hastings rustled away for her bonnet. Miss Holland sat where the afternoon light, falling through the corner window, smote her hair to a glory of pale colour, and St. George's eyes wandered to the glass through which the sun fell. It was a thin pane of irregular pieces set in a design of quaint, meaningless characters, in the centre of which was the figure of a sphinx, crucified upon an upright cross and surrounded by a border of coiled asps with winged heads. The window glittered like a sheet of gems.
"What wonderful glass," involuntarily said St. George.
"Is it not?" Miss Holland said enthusiastically. "My father sent it. He sent nearly all these things from abroad."
"I wonder where such glass is made," observed St. George; "it is like lace and precious stones--hardly more painted than carved."
She bent upon him such a sudden, searching look that St. George felt his eyes held by her own.
"Do you know anything of my father?" she demanded suddenly.
"Only that Mrs. Hastings has just told me that he is abroad--in the South Atlantic," St. George wonderingly replied.
"Why, I am very foolish," said Miss Holland quickly, "we have not heard from him in ten months now, and I am frightfully worried. Ah yes, the glass is beautiful. It was made in one of the South Atlantic islands, I believe--so were all these things," she added; "the same figure of the crucified sphinx is on many of them."
"Do you know what it means?" he asked.
"It is the symbol used by the people in one of the islands, my father said," she answered.
"These symbols usually, I believe," volunteered Mr. Frothingham, frowning at the glass, "have little significance, standing merely for the loose barbaric ideas of a loose barbaric nation."
St. George thought of the ladies of Doctor Johnson's Amicable Society who walked from the town hall to the Cathedral in Lichfield, "in linen gowns, and each has a stick with an acorn; but for the acorn they could give no reason."
He looked long at the glass.
"She," he said finally, "our false mulatto, ought to stand before just such glass."
Miss Holland laughed. She nodded her head a little, once, every time she laughed, and St. George was learning to watch for that.