, he still had an eye unmatched for female beauty.
The sun which makes that northern land a paradise in summer caught
the gold-brown hair of Gabriel Druse's daughter, and made it glint and
shine. It coquetted with the umber of her eyes and they grew luminous as
a jewel; it struck lightly across the pale russet of her cheek and made
it like an apple that one's lips touch lovingly, when one calls it "too
good to eat." It made an atmosphere of half-silver and half-gold with a
touch of sunrise crimson for her to walk in, translating her form into
melting lines of grace.

Jowett knew that Druse's daughter was on her way to the man who had
looked once, looked twice, looked thrice into her eyes and had seen
there his own image; and that she had done the same; and that the man,
it might be, would never look into their dark depths again. He might
speak once, he might speak twice, he might speak thrice, but would it
ever be the same as the look that needed no words?

When he crossed Fleda Druse's pathway she stopped short. She knew that
Jowett was Ingolby's true friend. She had seen him often, and he was
intimately associated with that day when she had run the Carillon Rapids
and had lain (for how long she never dared to think) in Ingolby's arms
in the sight of all the world. First among those who crowded round her
at Carillon that day were Jowett and Osterhaut, who had tried to warn
her.

"You are going to him?" she said now with confidence in her eyes, and by
the intimacy of the phrase (as though she could speak of Ingolby only as
him) their own understanding was complete.

"To see how he is and then to do other things," Jowett answered.

There was silence for a moment in which they moved slowly forward, and
then she said: "You were at Barbazon's last night?"

"When that Gipsy son of a dog gave him away!" he assented. "I never
heard anything like the speech Ingolby made. He had them in the throat.
The Gipsy would have had nothing out of it, if it hadn't been for the
horseshoe. But in spite of the giveaway, Ingolby was getting them where
they were soft-fairly drugging them with good news. You never heard such
dope. My, he was smooth! The golden, velvet truth it was, too. That's
the only kind he has in stock; and they were sort of stupefied and
locoed as they chewed his word-plant. Cicero must have been a saucy
singer of the dictionary, and Paul the Apostle had a dope of his own you
couldn't buy, but the gay gamut that Ingo