ked wonderfully young and
beautiful.]

In the dim light she looked wonderfully young and beautiful. The parted
opera-cloak disclosed her round straight throat and the broad smooth
modelling of the neck from which it rose. She seemed taller and more
stately than in street-dress, and at once younger, more defenceless,
more virginal. There was not enough light in the place to bring out the
contrasting colors of her hair. She looked like a black-haired beauty
with ivory-white skin, instead of an amber, red, and brown beauty, with
rosy, brown skin. Her head, small, round, and carried very high, lent
her an air of extraordinary breeding and distinction. She had no thought
for the short rose-brocade train of her dinner-dress, and let it trail
over the dirty floor.

"Mr. Blizzard!"

This time he answered. It sounded less like a voice than the hoarse bass
croak of a very enormous bull-frog.

"Please step this way."

Her head, if anything, a little higher than ever, she walked swiftly
forward right into the legless man's office.

His face was very white, swollen, it looked, and blotched with purple.
The veins in his forehead looked like mountain ranges on a
topographical map.

"I've only a minute," said Barbara.

He lowered his head now over his ledger, but said nothing. Then he
looked up and into her face steadily, and one by one the purple blotches
in his own face paled, and vanished, like the extinguishing of as many
hellish lights. And then to Barbara's horror a low groan, more like a
dog's than a man's, passed his tightly pressed lips, came out, and was
cut short off, as if with a keen knife.

"Are you sick?" she asked, not kindly, but imperatively and with a tone,
perhaps, of disgust.

"Yes," said the legless man briefly, but without going into any
explanation of his ailment. "You came to tell me that I mustn't go away
till the bust is finished. Is that it?"

Barbara felt more at her ease. "Yes," she said, "I am selfish about it.
It means so much to me."

"Well, you needn't have come," said Blizzard, and it was almost as if he
was angry with her for having done so. "I've changed my plans. I've had
to change them. I stay."

Barbara was immensely pleased. "I wish I could tell you how glad I am,"
she said.

"The thing now," said Blizzard, "is to get you back to your house. You
shouldn't have come to this part of the city at all; and especially not
dressed like that. But you didn't stop to think. You had an