She was a small fragile girl, with a lovely oval face, nut-brown hair that grew in a "widow's peak" on her forehead, and the prettiest dark blue eyes in the world.

Her figure drooped slightly in the shoulders, and was, as Mary Byrd pointed out in her dashing way, "without the faintest pretence to style." But if Margaret lacked "style," she possessed an unconscious grace which seemed to Stephen far more attractive.

It was delightful to watch the flowing lines of her clothes, as if, he used to imagine in a fanciful strain, she were poured out of some slender porcelain vase.

Her dress to-night, of delicate blue crepe, began slightly below the throat and reached almost to her ankles.

It was a fashion which he had always admired; but he realized that it gave Margaret, who was only twenty-two, a quaint air of maturity.
"I am so sorry I am late," he said, "but I had to go back to the office for a paper I'd forgotten." It was the truth as far as it went; and yet because it was not the whole truth, because his delay was due, not to his return for the paper, but to his meeting with Patty Vetch in the Square, his conscience pricked him uncomfortably.