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 connoisseur, was a recent model of one of the most expensive and popular foreign makes: built on lines that promised a deal in the way of speed, and furnished with engines that were pregnant with multiplied horse-power: all in all not the style of car one would expect to find controlled by a solitary woman, especially after ten of a summer's night.

Nevertheless the lone occupant of this car was a woman. And there was that in her bearing, an indefinable something,—whether it lay in the carriage of her head, which impressed one as both spirited and independent, or in an equally certain but less tangible air of self-confidence and reliance,—to set Mad Maitland's pulses drumming with excitement. For, unless indeed he labored gravely under a misapprehension, he was observing her for the second time within the past few hours.

Could he be mistaken, or was this in truth the same woman who had (as he believed) made herself free of his rooms that evening?

In confirmation of such suspicion he remarked her costume, which was altogether worked out in soft