present of whom he was so unremittingly conscious. It may be said
that from the moment that he had lifted her veil in his puzzled search
for her identity, he had been conscious of little else.

There was not a single movement of Miss Forrest's hands--and she had
certain little delightful, highly characteristic ways of helping out her
speech with slight yet significant motions--but had its place in Brown's
memory. She was not a frequent talker, she did not speak one word to Sue
Breckenridge's fifty; but when she did speak, in her voice of slow music,
people listened. And yet one never thought of her, Brown remembered, as a
silent person; the effect of her presence in any circle was that of a
personality of the active, not the passive, sort. The eyes of one
speaking must, involuntarily, be drawn to her because she was listening,
if I may coin a phrase, vividly. As for her looks--she possessed that
indescribable charm which is not wholly a matter of beautiful features,
but lies rather in such details as the lift of the eyebrow, the curve of
the lip, the droop of the hair upon the brow. She was dressed much more
simply than either of the older women present, yet with the simplicity,
it must be admitted, of the artist. She seemed somehow to make their
goodly showing fade before her own, as a crimson flower draws from the
colour of one of delicate blue.

Well, take them separately or as a group, they were an absorbing study to
the man who had seen so little of their kind for so long past, yet knew
that kind by the wontedness of his lifetime. He seemed to himself somehow
to be viewing them all, for the first time, from a vantage point he had
never before occupied. Every word they said in their pleasantly
modulated, well-bred voices, with the familiar accent of the educated
environment from which they came, and from which he came--it was his
accent, too, but somehow it sounded a bit foreign to him tonight--struck
upon his ear with a new meaning. Each gesture they made, personal and
familiar to him as they were, struck Brown now with its special
individuality.

"It's not fair, Don," said Sue Breckenridge suddenly, "for you to stand
over there in the shadow and watch us, without our being able to see your
face at all."

"You don't realize," declared Brown, in answer to this assertion and the
general assenting, laugh which followed it, backed by Atchison's. "Hear,
hear!" "that the group you all make in the light of my fire is