ith me, to lure me northward
with false offer of council and mockery of hospitality.

I was on my feet again in a flash, hot with anger, ready with insult to
meet insult, for I meant to go ere I had greeted my host--an insult,
indeed, and a deadly one among us. Furious, I bent to snatch my rifle
from the settle where it lay, and, as I flung it to my shoulder,
wheeling to go, my eyes fell upon a figure stealing down the stairway
from above, a woman in flowered silk, bare of throat and elbow, fingers
scarcely touching the banisters as she moved.

She hesitated, one foot poised for the step below; then it fell
noiselessly, and she stood before me.

Anger died out under the level beauty of her gaze. I bowed, just as I
caught a trace of mockery in the mouth's scarlet curve, and bowed the
lower for it, too, straightening slowly to the dignity her mischievous
eyes seemed to flout; and her lips, too, defied me, all silently--nay,
in every limb and from every finger-tip she seemed to flout me, and the
slow, deep courtesy she made me was too slow and far too low, and her
recovery a marvel of plastic malice.

"My cousin Ormond?" she lisped;--"I am Dorothy Varick."

We measured each other for a moment in silence.

There was a trace of powder on her bright hair, like a mist of snow on
gold; her gown's yoke was torn, for all its richness, and a wisp of lace
in rags fell, clouding the delicate half-sleeve of China silk.

Her face, colored like palest ivory with rose, was no doll's face, for
all its symmetry and a forgotten patch to balance the dimple in her
rounded chin; it was even noble in a sense, and, if too chaste for
sensuous beauty, yet touched with a strange and pensive sweetness, like
'witched marble waking into flesh.

Suddenly a voice came from above: "Dorothy, come here!"

My cousin frowned, glanced at me, then laughed.

"Dorothy, I want my watch!" repeated the voice.

Still looking at me, my cousin slowly drew from her bosom a huge,
jewelled watch, and displayed it for my inspection.

"We were matching mint-dates with shillings for father's watch; I won
it," she observed.

"Dorothy!" insisted the voice.

"Oh, la!" she cried, impatiently, "will you hush?"

"No, I won't!"

"Then our cousin Ormond will come up-stairs and give you what Paddy gave
the kettle-drum--won't you?" she added, raising her eyes to me.

"And what was that?" I asked, astonished.

Somebody on the landing above went off into fits of