a subdued
loquaciousness, always keeping her voice low and monotonous, always
looking out of the corner of her eye and speaking, as it were, in
asides, out of the corner of her mouth. She was scornful of
everything,--which became her eyebrows. Her face was mobile and
discontented, her eyes quick and black. There was a sort of smouldering
fire about her, young Ottenburg thought. She entertained him
prodigiously.

After luncheon Miss Beers said she was going uptown to be fitted, and
that she would go alone because her aunt made her nervous. When Fred
held her coat for her, she murmured, "Thank you, Alphonse," as if she
were addressing the waiter. As she stepped into a hansom, with a long
stretch of thin silk stocking, she said negligently, over her fur
collar, "Better let me take you along and drop you somewhere." He sprang
in after her, and she told the driver to go to the Park.

It was a bright winter day, and bitterly cold. Miss Beers asked Fred to
tell her about the game at New Haven, and when he did so paid no
attention to what he said. She sank back into the hansom and held her
muff before her face, lowering it occasionally to utter laconic remarks
about the people in the carriages they passed, interrupting Fred's
narrative in a disconcerting manner. As they entered the Park he
happened to glance under her wide black hat at her black eyes and
hair--the muff hid everything else--and discovered that she was crying.
To his solicitous inquiry she replied that it "was enough to make you
damp, to go and try on dresses to marry a man you weren't keen about."

Further explanations followed. She had thought she was "perfectly
cracked" about Brisbane, until she met Fred at the Holland House three
days ago. Then she knew she would scratch Brisbane's eyes out if she
married him. What was she going to do?

Fred told the driver to keep going. What did she want to do? Well, she
didn't know. One had to marry somebody, after all the machinery had been
put in motion. Perhaps she might as well scratch Brisbane as anybody
else; for scratch she would, if she didn't get what she wanted.

Of course, Fred agreed, one had to marry somebody. And certainly this
girl beat anything he had ever been up against before. Again he told the
driver to go ahead. Did she mean that she would think of marrying him,
by any chance? Of course she did, Alphonse. Hadn't he seen that all over
her face three days ago? If he hadn't, he was a snowball.

By