Supple of figure she was, and there were the big eyes this stricken friend of mine had told me of, and rather pronounced eyebrows, and her lips were full and red, and there was that fullness of the chin, or, rather, the vague dream or hint or vision of a daintily double chin at fifty, which means so much, but the forehead was what a woman's should be, and the glance of the eyes was clean and pure, though, in a clever woman's way, observant and comprehensive.

It was a cultivated and fascinating woman whom I met.
We talked together, and Grant Harlson looked on gratified, and she seemed to like me.

She made me feel, in her own way, that she liked me because she knew of me, and as we were talking I felt that she was paying, unconsciously, the greatest compliment she could to the man beside us.

I knew it was because of the other, and of something that he had said of me, that she was so readily on terms of comradeship.
And I knew, in the same connection, and from the same reasoning, that she had already begun to care as much for him as he for her--the man who, the night before, had so comported himself with me.

Of course, it appears absurd that I could reach such a conclusion upon so little basis, but to tell when people are interested in each other is not difficult sometimes, even for so dull a man as I.
"You have known Mr.Harlson many years, I believe," she said, and added smilingly: "What kind of a man is he ?" "A very bad man," I replied, gravely.
She turned to him in a charming, judicial way: "If your friends so describe you, Mr.Harlson, what must your enemies say?
And what have you to say in your own defense?
What you yourself have owned to me in the past is recognition of the soundness of the authority." "I haven't a word to say.