ancient vixen.
"Are you wanting to make trouble for her with the colonel? Be off, young
man. It ain't the first time I've told you you'd get nowhere in this
house!"

There was no possible answer left to Donnegan, and he did as usual the
surprising thing. He broke into laughter of such clear and ringing
tone--such infectious laughter--that the old woman blinked in the midst
of her wrath as though she were seeing a new man, and he saw the lips of
the girl parted in wonder.

"My father is an invalid," said the girl. "And he lives by strict rules.
I could not break in on him at this time of the evening."

"If that's all"--Donnegan actually began to mount the steps--"I'll go in
and talk to your father myself."

She had retired one pace as he began advancing, but as the import of
what he said became clear to her she was rooted to one position by
astonishment.

"Colonel Macon--my father--" she began. Then: "Do you really wish to see
him?"

The hushed voice made Donnegan smile--it was such a voice as one boy
uses when he asks the other if he really dares enter the pasture of the
red bull. He chuckled again, and this time she smiled, and her eyes were
widened, partly by fear of his purpose and partly from his nearness.
They seemed to be suddenly closer together. As though they were on one
side against a common enemy, and that enemy was her father. The old
woman was cackling sharply from the bottom of the stairs, and then
bobbing in pursuit and calling on Donnegan to come back. At length the
girl raised her hand and silenced her with a gesture.

Donnegan was now hardly a pace away; and he saw that she lived up to all
the promise of that first glance. Yet still she seemed unreal. There is
a quality of the unearthly about a girl's beauty; it is, after all, only
a gay moment between the formlessness of childhood and the hardness of
middle age. This girl was pale, Donnegan saw, and yet she had color. She
had the luster, say, of a white rose, and the same bloom. Lou, the old
woman had called her, and Macon was her father's name. Lou Macon--the
name fitted her, Donnegan thought. For that matter, if her name had been
Sally Smith, Donnegan would probably have thought it beautiful. The
keener a man's mind is and the more he knows about men and women and the
ways of the world, the more apt he is to be intoxicated by a touch of
grace and thoughtfulness; and all these age-long seconds the perfume of
girlhood had been striking up to