putation of
it; though it was indeed for some minutes next as if each tried to see
which could accuse the other of the greater miracle of penetration. Mark
was so struck, in a word, with the extraordinarily straight guess Winch
had had there in reserve for him that, other quick impressions helping,
there was nothing for him but to bring out, himself: "There must be,
my dear man, something rather wonderful the matter with you!" The quite
more intensely and more irresistibly drawn grin, the quite unmistakably
deeper consciousness in the dark, wide eye, that accompanied the not
quite immediate answer to which remark he was afterward to remember.
"How do you know that--or why do you think it?" "Because there _must_
be--for you to see! I shouldn't have expected it."

"Then you take me for a damned fool?" laughed wonderful Newton Winch.

VI

He could say nothing that, whether as to the sense of it or as to the
way of it, didn't so enrich Mark's vision of him that our friend, after
a little, as this effect proceeded, caught himself in the act of
almost too curiously gaping. Everything, from moment to moment, fed his
curiosity; such a question, for instance, as whether the quite ordinary
peepers of the Newton Winch of their earlier youth could have looked,
under any provocation, either dark or wide; such a question, above all,
as how _this_ incalculable apparition came by the whole startling power
of play of its extravagantly sensitive labial connections--exposed, so
to its advantage (he now jumped at one explanation) by the removal of
what had probably been one of the vulgar-est of moustaches. With this,
at the same time, the oddity of that particular consequence was vivid to
him; the glare of his curiosity fairly lasting while he remembered how
he had once noted the very opposite turn of the experiment for Phil
Bloodgood. He would have said in advance that poor Winch couldn't have
afforded to risk showing his "real" mouth; just as he would have said
that in spite of the fine ornament that so considerably muffled it Phil
could only have gained by showing his. But to have seen Phil shorn--as
he once had done--was earnestly to pray that he might promptly again
bristle; beneath Phil's moustache lurked nothing to "make up" for it in
case of removal. While he thought of which things the line of grimace,
as he could only have called it, the mobile, interesting, ironic line
the great double curve of which connected, in the fa