"She is indeed marvelously changed," thought Miss Burton. "I feel it even more than I can see it. There must be some other influence at work. Who are these friends she is visiting, and who send her back to us daily with some unexpected grace? Yesterday it was truthfulness—to-day an indescribable charm of manner that has banished the element of earthiness from her beauty. I think I will join my friend (who imagines himself something more) in the study of a problem that is becoming intensely interesting."
"Miss Mayhew," Van Berg found a chance to say after supper, "you are becoming a greater enigma to me than ever."
"Well," she replied, averting her face to hide the color that would rise at his rather abrupt and pointed address, "I'd rather be a Chinese puzzle to you than what I was."
"And I no doubt have appeared to you like a Chinese Mandarin, Grand Turk, Great Mogul, not name self-satisfied Pharisees, and all of that ilk."
"I can't say that you have, and yet I've keenly felt your superiority. I think the character you are now enacting is more becoming than any of those would be, however."
"What is that?" he asked quickly.
"Well," she said hesitatingly, "I hardly know how to describe it, but it suggests a little the kindness which, they say, makes all the world kin. Good-night, Mr. Van Berg."
"Miss Jennie," he said, later in the evening, "you have an insight into character which we grosser mortals do not possess. Do you think that there is a marked change taking place in Miss Mayhew?"
"And so you expect me to read Miss Mayhew's secrets and gossip about them with you?" she answered with one of her piquant smiles.
"What a sweetbrier you are! Now tell me in your own happy way how you would describe this change which you see and understand far more clearly than I."