charge right out of his frame and trample. Take a look at
that nose, parson--like a double-barreled shotgun, for all the world!
Beautiful brute, Inglesby. Makes you think of that minotaur sideshow
they used to put over on the Greeks."

In view of Laurence and of Mary Virginia, I saw the resemblance.

Mr. Hunter's office was less formal than Mr. Inglesby's, and furnished
with an exact and critical taste alien to Appleboro, where many a
worthy citizen's office trappings consist of an alpaca coat, a chair
and a pine table, three or four fly-specked calendars and shabby
ledgers, and a box of sawdust. To these may sometimes be added a pot
of paste with a dead cockroach in it, or a hound dog either scratching
fleas or snapping at flies.

Here the square of carpet was brown as fallen pine-needles in October,
the walls were a soft tan, the ceiling and woodwork ivory-toned. One
saw between the windows a bookcase filled with handsomely bound books,
and on top of it a few pieces of such old china as would enrapture my
mother. The white marble mantel held one or two signed photographs in
silver frames, a pair of old candlesticks of quaint and pleasing
design, and a dull red pottery vase full of Japanese quince. There
were a few good pictures on the walls--a gay impudent Detaille Lancer
whose hardy face of a fighting Frenchman warmed one's heart; some
sketches signed with notable American names; and above the mantel a
female form clothed only in the ambient air, her long hair swept back
from her shoulders, and a pearl-colored dove alighting upon her
outstretched finger.

I suppose one might call the whole room beautiful, for even the desk
was of that perfection of simplicity whose cost is as rubies. It was
not, however, a womanish room; there was no slightest hint of
femininity in its uncluttered, sane, forceful orderliness. It was
rather like Hunter himself--polished, perfect, with a note of finality
and of fitness upon it like a hall-mark. Nothing out of keeping,
nothing overdone. Even the red petal fallen from the pottery vase on
the white marble mantel was a last note of perfection.

Flint glanced about him with the falcon-glance that nothing escapes.
For a moment the light stayed upon the nude figure over the
mantel--the one real nude in all Appleboro, which cherishes family
portraits of rakehelly old colonials in wigs, chokers, and
tight-fitting smalls, and lolloping ladies with very low necks and
sixteen petticoats, bu