--of course, I should like to see her,
because I never did see living beauty such as hers in any woman. Not
even in my pictures. What superb eyes! What a fascinately delicate nose!
_What_ a nose! By Heaven, that nose _is_ a nose! I'll draw noses _that_
way in future. My pictures are all out of drawing; I must fit arms into
their sockets the way hers fit! I must remember the modeling of her
eyelids, too--and that chin! and those enchanting hands--"

She looked up leisurely from her book, surveyed him calmly, absent-eyed,
then bent her head again to the reading.

"There _is_ something the matter with me," he thought with a suppressed
gulp. "I--if she looks at me again--with those iris-hued eyes of a
young goddess--I--I think I'm done for. I believe I'm done for anyway.
It seems rather mad to think it. But there _is_ something the matter--"

She deliberately looked at him again.

"It's all wrong for them to let loose a girl like that on people," he
thought to himself, "all wrong. Everybody is bound to go mad over her.
I'm going now. I'm mad already. I know I am, which proves I'm no
lunatic. It isn't her beauty; it's the way she wears it--every motion,
every breath of her. I know exactly what her voice is like. Anybody who
looks into her eyes can see what her soul is like. She isn't out of
drawing anywhere--physically or spiritually. And when a man sees a girl
like that, why--why there's only one thing that can happen to him as far
as I can see. And it doesn't take a year either. Heavens! How awfully
remote from me she seems to be."

She looked up again, calmly, but not at him. A kindly, gray-whiskered
old gentleman came tottering and rocking into view, his rosy, wrinkled
face beaming benediction on the world as he passed through it--on the
sunshine dappling the undergrowth, on the furry squirrels sitting up on
their hind legs to watch him pass, on the stray dickybird that hopped
fearlessly in his path, at the young man sitting very rigid there on
his bench, at the fair, sweet-faced girl who met his aged eyes with the
gentlest of involuntary smiles. And Carden did not recognize him!

Who could help smiling confidently into that benign face, with its gray
hair and gray whiskers? Goodness radiated from every wrinkle.

"Dr. Atwood!" exclaimed the girl softly as she rose to meet this
marvelous imitation of Dr. Austin Atwood, the great specialist on
children's diseases.

The old man beamed weakly at her, halted, still be