r he apparently did not hear it. The two
girls went down and had talked to the others a few minutes and all had
seated themselves before he entered. An inch or so above six feet,
powerful in the chest and shoulders, he moved with a large grace until
he became self-conscious or approached the, by comparison, frail pieces
of furniture. He had penetrating, candid eyes that looked dark in the
gaslight but were steel-blue. His face now wore the typical
western-American expression--shrewd, easy-going good humor. Mrs.
Trent, intrenched in state behind a huge, silver-plated coffee-urn with
ivory-trimmed faucet, introduced him--Mr. Scarborough--to Olivia, to
Pauline, to Sadie McIntosh, to Pierson and Howe and Thiebaud
(pronounced Cay-bo). Scarborough sat directly opposite Olivia. But
whenever he lifted his eyes from his plate he looked at Pauline, who
was next to her. When she caught him he blushed and stirred in his
chair so uneasily that it creaked and crackled; and his normal
difficulties with his large hands and the small knife and fork were
distressingly increased.

Pauline was disappointed in him--his clothes were ill-fitting and gave
him the appearance of being in danger of bursting from them; his hair
was too long, suggesting a shaggy, tawny mane; though his hands were
well-shaped they had the recent scars of hard manual labor. Thus, when
Olivia spoke enthusiastically of him after supper, she made no reply.
She would have been ashamed to acknowledge the reasons for her lack of
admiration, even had she been conscious of them.

But the next morning at breakfast she revised her opinion somewhat. He
talked, and he had a remarkable voice--clear, musical, with a quality
which made it seem to penetrate through all the nerves instead of
through the auditory nerve only. Further, he talked straight to
Pauline, without embarrassment and with a quaint, satiric humor. She
was forgetting for the moment his almost uncouth hair and dress when,
in making a sweeping gesture, he upset a glass of water and sent a
plate of hot bread flying from the waitress' hand.

"He'd do well in the open air," thought she, "but he's out of place in
a house."

Still, she found him interesting and original. And he persistently
sought her--his persistence was little short of heroism in view of the
never-wholly-concealed sufferings which the contrast between her grace
and style and his lack of both caused him.

"He looks like a king who had b