The woman was powerfully built with astonishing breadth of shoulder and length of limb, but perfectly proportioned.  She was young, hardly more than twenty, St. George fancied, and of the peculiar litheness which needs no motion to be manifest.  Her clear skin was of wonderful brown; and her eyes, large and dark, with something of the oriental watchfulness, were like opaque gems and not more penetrable.  Her look was immovably fixed upon St. George as if she divined that in some way his coming affected her.

“We will have our hymn first.”  Mrs. Manners’ words were buzzing and pecking in the air.  “What can I have done with that list of numbers?  We have to select our pieces most carefully,” she confided to St. George, “so to be sure that Soul’s Prison or Hands Red as Crimson, or, Do You See the Hebrew Captive Kneeling? or anything personal like that doesn’t occur.  Now what can I have done with that list?”

Her words reached St. George but vaguely.  He was in a fever of anticipation and enthusiasm.  He turned quickly to Mrs. Manners.

“During the hymn,” he said simply, “I would like to speak with one of the women.  Have I your permission?”

Mrs. Manners looked momentarily perplexed; but her eyes at that instant chancing upon her lost list of hymns, she let fall an abstracted assent and hurried to the waiting organist.  Immediately St. George stepped quietly down among the women already fluttering the leaves of their hymn books, and sat beside the mulatto woman.

Her eyes met his in eager questioning, but she had that temper of unsurprise of many of the eastern peoples and of some animals.  Yet she was under some strong excitement, for her hands, large but faultlessly modeled, were pressed tensely together.  And St. George saw that she was by no means a mulatto, or of any race that he was able to name.  Her features were classic and of exceeding fineness, and her face was sensitive and highly-bred and filled with repose, like the surprising repose of breathing arrested in marble.  There was that about her, however, which would have made one, constituted to perceive only the arbitrary balance of things, feel almost afraid; while one of high organization would inevitably have been smitten by some sense of the incalculably higher organization of her nature, a nature which breathed forth an influence, laid a spell—­did something indefinable.  Sometimes one stands too closely to a statue and is frightened by the nearness, as by the nearness of one of an alien region.  St. George felt this directly he spoke to her.  He shook off the impression and set himself practically to the matter in hand.  He had never had greater need of his faculty for directness.  His low tone was quite matter-of-fact, his manner deferentially reassuring.

“I think,” he said softly and without preface, “that I can help you.  Will you let me help you?  Will you tell me quickly your name?”