again, and this time more strongly than by the
flare of light against his eyes. For in the voice he recognized the
quality of the girl--the same softness, the same velvety richness,
though the pitch was a bass. In the voice of this man there was the same
suggestion that the tone would crack if it were forced either up or
down. With this great difference, one could hardly conceive of a
situation which would push that man's voice beyond its monotone. It
flowed with deadly, all-embracing softness. It clung about one; it
fascinated and baffled the mind of the listener.

But Donnegan was not in the habit of being baffled by voices. Neither
was he a lover of formality. He looked about for a place to sit down,
and immediately discovered that while the invalid sat in an enormous
easy-chair bordered by shelves and supplied with wheels for raising and
lowering the back and for propelling the chair about the room on its
rubber tires, it was the only chair in the room which could make any
pretensions toward comfort. As a matter of fact, aside from this one
immense chair, devoted to the pleasure of the invalid, there was nothing
in the room for his visitors to sit upon except two or three miserable
backless stools.

But Donnegan was not long taken aback. He tucked his cap under his arm,
bowed profoundly in honor of the colonel's compliments, and brought one
of the stools to a place where it was no nearer the rather ominous
circle of the lamplight than was the invalid himself. With his eyes
accustomed to the new light, Donnegan could now take better stock of his
host. He saw a rather handsome face, with eyes exceedingly blue, young,
and active; but the features of Macon as well as his body were blurred
and obscured by a great fatness. He was truly a prodigious man, and one
could understand the stoutness with which the invalid chair was made.
His great wrist dimpled like the wrist of a healthy baby, and his face
was so enlarged with superfluous flesh that the lower part of it quite
dwarfed the upper. He seemed, at first glance, a man with a low forehead
and bright, careless eyes and a body made immobile by flesh and
sickness. A man whose spirits despised and defied pain. Yet a second
glance showed that the forehead was, after all, a nobly proportioned
one, and for all the bulk of that figure, for all the cripple-chair,
Donnegan would not have been surprised to see the bulk spring lightly
out of the chair to meet him.

For his own p