The house was very quiet to-night. There was nothing to disturb Miss Alexandra Moran but the placid ticking of the clock and the faint stir of the curtains at the open window. For that matter, a considerable amount of noise would not have troubled her just then.

As she sat at the library table, the light of the shaded lamp shone upon her bright, ruffled head bent over her work in fiercest concentration. She was chewing the end of a badly damaged lead pencil, and she was scowling.

She laid down the pencil and sat back in the chair, with her arms folded. Though her present difficulty concerned nothing more serious than a crossword puzzle, an observer might have learned a good deal of Miss Moran's character from her manner of dealing with it.

The puzzle itself, with its neat, clear little letters printed in the squares, would have been a revelation that whatever she undertook she did carefully and intelligently, and obstinately.