t just a flicker of her eye across her book,
as though, she, on her part, were studying him.

It was her back hair which had first entangled Dr. Blake's thoughts; it
was the graceful nape of her neck which had served to hold them fast.
When the hair and the neck below dawned on him, he identified her as
that blonde girl whom he had noted at the train gate, waving farewell
to some receding friend--and noted with approval. As a traveler on many
seas and much land, he knew the lonely longing to address the woman in
the next seat. He knew also, as all seasoned travelers in America know,
that such desire is sometimes gratified, and without any surrender of
decency, in the frank and easy West--but never east of Chicago. This
girl, however, exercised somehow, a special pull upon his attention and
his imagination. And he found himself playing a game by which he had
mitigated many a journey of old. He divided his personality into two
parts--man and physician--and tried, by each separate power, to find as
much as he could from surface indications about this travel-mate of
his.

Mr. Walter Huntington Blake perceived, besides the hair like dripping
honey, deep blue eyes--the blue not of a turquoise but of a
sapphire--and an oval face a little too narrow in the jaw, so that the
chin pointed a delicate Gothic arch. He noted a good forehead, which
inclined him to the belief that she "did" something--some subtle
addition which he could not formulate confirmed that observation. He
saw that her hands were long and tipped with nails no larger than a
grain of maize, that when they rested for a moment on her face, in the
shifting attitudes of her reading, they fell as gently as flower-stalks
swaying together in a breeze. He saw that her shoulders had a slight
slope, which combined with hands and eyes to express a being all
feminine--the kind made for a lodestone to a man who has known the hard
spots of the world, like Mr. Walter Huntington Blake.

"A pippin!" pronounced Mr. Blake, the man.

Dr. Blake, the physician, on the other hand, caught a certain languor
in her movements, a physical tenuity which, in a patient, he would have
considered diagnostic. So transparent was her skin that when her
profile dipped forward across a bar of sunshine the light shone through
the bridge of her nose--a little observation charming to Blake, the
man, but a guide to Blake, the physician. She had the look, Dr. Blake
told himself, which old-fashioned cou