appearance, as awful as it was immaculate, should pound open the
heart of any woman alive; and his suppressed excitement was too powerful
for him to resent even the obvious repugnance in the faces of the men
until he imagined an intentional discourtesy to the boy on the part of
the waiter.

To himself, the man was over-servile, and elaborately cautious in
pulling out his chair, but he stood, with his face quite white, and his
back to the boy, and pulled out none for him. Henry Montagu had never
yet bullied a waiter, and he did not bully now. But with an icy glare
of reproof at the man, he rose and set the chair for his guest himself.

"Shall I order for you?" he asked gently as the boy sat quietly down;
and made irritably incisive by the tendency of near-by men and women to
listen as well as watch, he emphasized his expensive order of foods and
wines, repeated each item loudly to cheapen the listeners, and sent the
man scuttling.

In his intense desire to see the effect of the queerly chosen place on
his queerly chosen companion, he now turned to him. And as he saw the
effect, every shock of the night seemed to recoil upon him. The feeling
of mystery; the foreboding, despite his courage and his conviction that
the boy was mad, of the imminent unknown; his recurrent and absorbing
curiosity to learn the gruesome secret that he had declared; all rushed
one by one back upon him, and then as swiftly left him to the simple
grip of horror at his face. It was gazing at woman after woman, here,
there and yonder, throughout the large room, deliberately, searchingly,
venomously, its great eyes and set lips and every tense haggard line
fuller and fuller of an undying hate that eclipsed even that which had
shaken Henry Montagu before they came. Appalled and fascinated, he
looked with him, and back at him, and with him again, to the next and
the next. There were women there, and ladies of every sort, good, bad
and indecipherable; yet in every instance the childlike, horribly
sophisticated eyes had picked their victim unerringly, deterred by
neither clothes, veneer, nor manner.

As he stared with him from frightened female face to frightened female
face, Mr. Montagu realized shamefully that his own features were
helplessly mirroring the detestation of the boy's, and he changed from
very pale to very red himself as woman after woman flushed crimson under
his gaze. Yet the boy's face grew calm and his voice was perfectly so as
he t