ldlike face was stamped with grief; a child in distress and
a child who needed comforting. Just as once before, when there was no
escape, Paul had fought the Marquess kid and had been astonished at the
ease of battle, so now an impulse seized him and he found himself acting
without premeditation. He was the man looking on at the tears of a
woman, and a woman whose laughter had often been his comfort.
Instinctively he folded her in his arms and kissed the soft hair which
was all that showed itself of the bowed head and hidden face.

Now when for the first time he held her close to him he felt a tremor of
sobs run through the slender figure. His pulses heightened their tempo
as he became conscious of the soft palpitation of her shoulders and
bosom.

Sympathy, he thought, actuated him. He took the averted face between his
hands and raised it gently, but with a strong pressure until the
tear-stained eyes were looking into his own.

Her lips were very petal-like and her eyes were very dewy and on each
cheek bloomed a spot of color heightened by the pallor of the moment.

Paul Burton at the instant forgot Loraine Haswell, the prize of his
brother's grand larceny for his pleasure, forgot that this woman was no
more than his Platonic friend and remembered only that her chin rested
in his hand and that his arm encircled her, as he bent his head and
pressed his lips against the mouth that trembled.

He did not think of the demonstration as necessarily loverlike. His
nature was instinctive, not analytical, but suddenly there swept into
the utterly lonely and battle-weary eyes of the woman, who was _not_ a
child, a smile of happiness and comfort which parted her lips, so that
her face reminded him of sudden sunshine flashing into rainbow hope
through an April shower. He could feel the heart fluttering wildly in
her breast, and at once he knew that to her his kiss had meant an avowal
of love--that in her code there was no place for light or unmeaning
caresses.

He rose and his face paled. The indecisiveness which never dared to
grasp the thistle firmly was troubling him with a new dilemma. Yet
something in Marcia Terroll made a call upon him which no other woman
had yet made--the call to be honest at all cost.

With his averted face toward the window, in a forced and level voice,
not daring to meet her eyes, he told her almost all there was to tell
about Loraine Haswell. The new spark of manhood she had awakened in him
made