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CHAPTER III AFTER EVENTS Here was a freakish thing. I had talked about Destiny as a dea ex machina, and the goddess personally had come to superintend the drama in which I was supposed—as I shrewdly suspected by this time—to take a leading part. However, as open confession is good for the soul, I may as well state, and at the eleventh hour, that this story was written when the mystery was solved and justice had been done—I threw it, as it were, into a fictional form. Thus, as I knew the odd name of the little lady when writing I played upon its oddity, and saw in her the incarnation of the goddess who maps out the future. You can take this explanation with or without the proverbial grain of salt, as you choose. Meanwhile, here we are on the threshold of a mystery, and a flesh and blood creature, with the significant name of Destiny appears on the scene. When the new-comer stood up and turned her face to the light I had a better view of her. She was even smaller than Mrs. Giles—what one would call a tiny woman—and was perfectly shaped. Not quite a dwarf, but very nearly one, and her face, pointed, wrinkled, and of a parchment hue, looked as old as the Pyramids. The most youthful thing about her was the undimmed brilliancy of her eyes. These, dark, piercing, unwinking, and marvellously steady, blazed—I use the word advisedly—under a Marie Antoinette arrangement of wonderfuly white hair, like spun silk. Her hat had been removed by theofficious Mrs. Faith, so I could take in her looks very easily. She wore a shabby black silk dress, much worn, an equally shabby black velvet mantle, old- fashioned and trimmed sparsely with beads, and had cottongloves—black ones—on her skinny hands, with cloth boots on her tiny feet. From her general appearance she might have stepped out of a ...
