He himself leaned back in his chair, but half of one absent ear given to
Mr. Bayweather's lecture, and enjoyed himself looking at Mrs.
Crittenden. She was pretty, Mrs. Crittenden was. He hadn't been sure
the first day, but now he had had a chance to get used to her face being
so long and sort of pointed, and her eyes long too, and her black
eyebrows running back almost into her hair, he liked every bit of her
face. It looked so different from anybody else's. He noticed with an
inward smile that she was fidgety under Mr. Bayweather's historical
talk. _He_ was the only person with any patience in that whole bunch.
But at what a price had he acquired it!

By and by Mrs. Crittenden got up quietly and went out into the other
office as if on an errand.

Mr. Bayweather took advantage of her absence to tell them a lot about
how much the Crittendens had done for the whole region and what a golden
thing Mrs. Crittenden's music had been for everybody, and about an
original conception of business which Mr. Crittenden seemed to have. Mr.
Welles was not interested in music, but he was in business and he would
have liked to hear a great deal more about this, but just at this point,
as if to cut the clergyman off, in came Mr. Crttenden, very brisk and
prompt, ready to take them around the mill.

Vincent stood up. They all stood up. Mr. Welles noted that Vincent had
quite come out of his brown study and was now all there. He was as he
usually was, a wire charged with a very high-voltage current.

They went out now, all of them together, but soon broke up into two
groups. He stayed behind with Mr. Crittenden and pretended to look at
the machinery of the saw-mill, which he found very boring indeed, as he
hadn't the slightest comprehension of a single cog in it. But there was
something there at which he really looked. It was the expression of Mr.
Crittenden's face as he walked about, and it was the expression on the
faces of the men as they looked at the boss.

Mr. Welles, not being a talker, had had a great deal of opportunity to
study the faces of others, and he had become rather a specialist in
expressions. Part of his usefulness in the office had come from that.
He had catalogued in his mind the different looks on human faces, and
most of them connected with any form of business organization were
infinitely familiar to him, from the way the casual itinerant temporary
laborer looked at the boss of his gang, to the way the star s