“You have seen her then?” I asked.
“Yesterday. I talked to her. Yes, I suppose she does love clothes and finery. It is on account of her—dark blood.”
“Her what?” I sat bolt upright.
“Good Lord, Miss Keate! Didn’t you know that?”
“Know that Corole Letheny is a——?”
“I think it comes to her by way of Haiti,” he interrupted. “And a very beautiful mother.”
“But—her light hair and eyes! You must be mistaken!”
“Her eyes are yellow, Miss Keate. A good deal like a tiger’s. In fact she is a rather tigerish lady, on the whole. I suspected it when I first saw her brown hands, and was convinced when I found a reference to her in Dr. Letheny’s papers; once he mentions her rather bitterly as ‘my mulatto cousin,’ and another time refers to her birthplace and his aunt, Jolbar, who, it seems, traced her lineage directly, if unobtrusively, to a cannibalistic royal line. Don’t be so shocked, Miss Keate. A little mixture of blood doesn’t hurt her. It only increases my difficulty.”
“Increases your difficulty?” I murmured, feeling rather dazed.
“By increasing the complexities of a personality that I must classify and index. You see,” he went on, as I still did not wholly understand him, “Corole is a factor to be considered along with the rest of the possibilities. And this fact warns me that she likely has a streak of savagery back of those yellow eyes; that the beat of tom-toms would stir her, for instance. She is apt to be rather indolent, too, and to seek what she desires in unconventional ways. Such as by the use of revolvers.”