"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.