The Wisdom of Father Brown

she had felt an imperative need of the high solitudes and eternal snows. They planned a week's rest, and

d dying groans, so deep in the background of her memory were the people and events of her merely personal life. One of the young women was very tall, with a slim dashing figure, fine fair hair, keen cold gray eyes, a haughty nostril and upper lip: a beauty of the patrician American type. The other was shorter but also excessively thin, with dark dancing eyes, a warm color, a coquettish nose and pouting lips-which somehow invoked the c

d out her hand to Kate. "It is a long while

o America and fool everybody! I wish I had come across you. It would have been quite dramatic to tear off th

with a charming smile: "But later, I was so proud to have known Gisela D?ring, that person

numerable questions about the other girls, particularly Mariette, whom she remembered as a Germanic blonde of warm coloring, the coldest eyes, the most subtly rigid and ruthless mouth she had ever seen. She had found some difficulty picturi

at divided them. When they dropped suddenly at a chance word to the present that gripped even these glittering snow fields with its red insatiable fi

t least. What are you thi

ve tea and then skate again. I noticed ho

l charm when not too obviously insincere, enjoyed the hour on the ice so exclusively devoted to her by the distinguished American and went to bed that night well content to bury the war during this period of necessary rest, gra

great intelligence and an iron will: she was far more the obvious leader than they had inferred from her work, and they guessed something of the powerful influence she must quietly have obtained over the women of Germany. Mrs. Prentiss had by no means approved of her at an earlier period, for she had shrewdly suspected that it was the handsome German governess, not the high-born Irma, who thwarted her des

fact in damning sequence. The result of this momentous conference was that none of the five went to bed on the following