to transfer her to his notebook. Her
step was sprightly, her face warm and cheerful in hue, her figure
excellent, her walk the most admirable thing about her--swaying, graceful,
lissom--like perfect dancing with the whole body. Her walk was immediately
merged into somebody else's--merged melodiously, if one may say so. A man
came from the pump-room looking after the girl, and Hagar remarked a
similar swaying impulsion in the walk of both. He walked as far as the
gate of the pump-room, then sauntered back, unfolded a newspaper, closed
it up again, lit a cigar, and, like Hagar, stood watching the crowd
abstractedly. He was an outstanding figure. Ladies, as they waited,
occasionally looked at him through their glasses, and the Duchess of
Brevoort thought he would make a picturesque figure for a reception--she
was not less sure because his manner was neither savage nor suburban.
George Hagar was known to some people as "the fellow who looks back of
you." Mark Telford might have been spoken of as "the man who looks through
you," for, when he did glance at a man or woman, it was with keen
directness, affecting the person looked at like a flash of light to the
eye. It is easy to write such things, not so easy to verify them, but any
one that has seen the sleuthlike eyes of men accustomed to dealing with
danger in the shape of wild beasts or treacherous tribes or still more
treacherous companions, and whose lives depend upon their feeling for
peril and their unerring vigilance can see what George Hagar saw in Mark
Telford's looks.
Telford's glance went round the crowd, appearing to rest for an instant on
every person, and for a longer time on Hagar. The eyes of the two men met.
Both were immediately puzzled, for each had a sensation of some
subterranean origin. Telford immediately afterward passed out of the gate
and went toward the St. Cloud gardens, where the band was playing. For a
time Hagar did not stir, but idled with his pencil and notebook. Suddenly
he started, and hurried out in the direction Telford had gone.
"I was an ass," he said to himself, "not to think of that at first."
He entered the St. Cloud gardens and walked round the promenade a few
times, but without finding him. Presently, however, Alpheus Richmond,
whose beautiful and brilliant waistcoat and brass buttons with monogram
adorned showed advantageously in the morning sunshine, said to him: "I
say, Hagar, who's that chap up there filling the door of the
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