oo," she added, looking at me, "but
perhaps I'd better not repeat that."

"Shall I try to guess it?" I asked. "Did he say I was a scholar?"

"Yes."

"And a gentleman?"

"Yes."

"But confoundedly conceited?"

"No--well, not quite. Something like it, Mr. Austin. How did you know?"

"It's what he use to say to me himself three times a week?"

Her face had lit up in merriment during this little talk, but now she
grew thoughtful again. I might well have looked thoughtful, too; so far
as had appeared at present, there was no injunction against parting with
me--no worth-his-weight-in-gold appraisement of the secretary!

"I expect he liked the scholar-and-gentleman part," she reflected. "He
wasn't at all a scholar himself, I suppose?"

"He'd had no time for that," said Cartmell.

"Nor a gentleman?"

It was an embarrassing question--from a daughter about her
father--addressed to Cartmell who owed him much and to me who had eaten
his bread. Besides--he was lying there in his room upstairs. Cartmell
faced the difficulty with simple directness.

"He wasn't polished in manner; when he was opposed or got angry, he was
rough. But he was honest and straight, upright and just, kind and----"

"Kind?" she interrupted, a note of indignation plain to hear in her
voice. "Not to me!"

That was awkward again!

"My dear Miss Driver, for what may have been amiss he's made you the
best amends he could." He waved his arm as though to take in all the
great house in which we sat. "Handsome amends!"

"Yes," she assented--but her assent did not sound very hearty.

A long silence followed--an uncomfortable silence. She was looking
toward the window, and I could watch her face unperceived. From our
first meeting I had been haunted by a sense of having seen her before,
but I soon convinced myself that this was a delusion. I had not seen
her, nor anyone like her (she was not at all like her father), in the
flesh, but I had seen pictures that were like her. Not modern pictures,
but sixteenth- or seventeenth-century portraits. Her hair was brown with
ruddy tips, her brows not arched but very straight, her nose fine-cut
and high, her mouth not large but her lips very red. Her chin was rather
long, and her face wore the smooth, almost waxy, pallor which the
pictures I was reminded of are apt to exhibit. Her eyes were so
pronounced and bright a hazel that, seeing them on a canvas, one might
have suspected the painter of taking a liberty