, mustache and
Vandyke beard were gray; he was tall, thin, and perhaps seventy-five
years old. His complexion impressed one most unpleasantly because of its
sallow, almost yellow, hue; and although I had not yet had a full-face
view of him I intuitively knew that his teeth were long and thin and
yellow. A slight palsy never let his head be still, as if some
persistent agent were making him deny, eternally deny, an inarticulate
accusation--as accusations of the conscience perforce must be.

Despite his grumpy silence he showed an air of repressed excitement,
sending frequent, shifty glances over the room; and that he possessed
the temper of a fiend I did not doubt after seeing him turn upon the
waiter for some trifling omission and reduce that usually placid
individual to a state of amazed incapacity. Then a quick, really a
pitiful, look of terror came into the girl's eyes as she shrank back in
her chair. It lasted but a second before she was again making herself
agreeable--acting, of course--and I wanted to cross to him and demand:
"Why is this lady afraid?"

I hated the man; at first sight I loathed him. It was one of those
antipathies sometimes observed in dogs that see each other from a
distance--hair up and teeth bared. The feeling is spontaneous,
unpredictable, and the usual result is fight.

Up to this time she had not seen me, or even known of my insignificant
existence; but suddenly, as though it were a sally of banter whose blade
he parried in the nick of time, her laughter-bathed eyes darted past him
and squarely met my own; her lips sobered into a half parted expression
of interest and, some strange thought--perhaps unbidden--coming into her
mind, sent the blood surging to her cheeks. As quickly as this happened
it had gone, and again she seemed to be absorbing the attention of her
_vis-a-vis_.

Once, years ago in the Dolomites, I thoughtlessly struck my staff upon a
piece of rock when, lo, a wonderful tone arose therefrom. And the memory
of that rich, unbidden sound was re-awakened now as the contact of our
glances stirred something which thrilled me with a maddening sense of
harmony. As an E string vibrates when another E is struck somewhere near
to it, so my being vibrated with each tilt of her head, each movement of
her lips. Yet however much I conjured the magnet of my will to make her
look again, she successfully, if coquettishly, resisted.

The Spanish waiter came up softly to refill my glass; an