Johns, with their hooked noses and
their lyric eyes!

Mrs. Malcolm described him as fascinating. There was about him that
sense of secret power that only politicians, usually meretriciously, and
diplomats, and, above all, great bankers as a rule possess; yet he
seldom talked of his own life, or the mission that had brought him to
New York; instead, in his sonorous, slightly Hebraic voice, he drew
other people on to talk about themselves, or else, to artists and
writers and their sort, discovered an amazing, discouraging knowledge of
the trades by which they earned their living. "One feels," said Mrs.
Malcolm, "that one is eyeing a sensitive python. He uncoils
beautifully."

They were seated at the round, candle-lit table, the rest of the room in
partial shadow, Sir John looking like a lost Rembrandt, and his blonde
wife, with her soft English face, like a rose-and-gray portrait by
Reynolds, when Burnaby strode in upon them ... strode in upon them, and
then, as if remembering the repression he believed in, hesitated, and
finally advanced quietly toward Mrs. Malcolm. One could smell the snowy
February night still about him.

"I'm so sorry," he said. "I--"

"You broke down, I suppose," said Mrs. Malcolm, "or the noon train from
Washington was late for the first time in six years. What do you do in
Washington, anyway? Moon about the Smithsonian?"

"No," said Burnaby, as he sank into a chair and unfolded his napkin.
"Y'see--well, that is--I ran across a fellow--an Englishman--who knew a
chap I met last summer up on the Francis River--I didn't exactly meet
him, that is, I ran into him, and it wasn't the Francis River really, it
was the Upper Liara, a branch that comes in from the northwest. Strange,
wasn't it?--this fellow, this Englishman, got to talking about tea, and
that reminded me of the whole thing." He paused on the last word and,
with a peculiar habit that is much his own, stared across the table at
Lady Masters, but over and through her, as if that pretty pink-and-white
woman had entirely disappeared,--and the warm shadows behind her,--and
in her place were no one could guess what vistas of tumbling rivers and
barren tundras.

"Tea!" ejaculated Mrs. Malcolm.

Burnaby came back to the flower-scented circle of light.

"Yes," he said soberly, "tea. Exactly."

Mrs. Malcolm's delicate eyebrows rose to a point. "What," she asked, in
the tones of delighted motherhood overlaid with a slight exasperation
which s