odruff inquired. Mr. Drew, as if aware of
their scrutiny, had turned his eyes upon them for a moment. They were
large, jaded eyes, lustrous, yet with the lustre of a surface rather
than of depth; dense, velvety and impenetrable.

"Well, no, I don't," said Gregory, genially decisive. "He looks
unwholesome, I think."

"Oh! Unwholesome?" Miss Woodruff repeated the word thoughtfully rather
than interrogatively. "Yes; perhaps it is that. It is a danger of
talented modern young men, isn't it. They are not strong enough to be so
intelligent; one must be very strong--in character, I mean--if one is to
be so intelligent. Perhaps he is not strong in character. Perhaps that
is what one feels. Because I do not like his face, either; and I go
greatly by faces."

"So do I," said Gregory. After a moment, in which they both continued to
look at Mr. Drew, he went on. "I wondered last night what nationality
you belonged to. I had been wondering about you for a long while before
you looked round at me."

"You had heard about me?" she asked.

He was pleased to be able to say: "Oh, I wondered about you before I
heard."

"People are so often interested in me because of my guardian," said Miss
Woodruff; "everything about her interests them. But I am an American--if
you were not told; that is to say my father was an American--and my
mother was a Norwegian; but though I have never been to America I count
myself as an American, and with right, I think," she added. "We always
spoke English when I was a child, and I remember so many of my father's
friends. Some day I hope I may go to America. Have you been there? Do
you know New England? My father came from New England."

"No; I've never been there. I'm very insular and untravelled."

"Are you? It is a pity not to travel, isn't it," Miss Woodruff remarked.

"But you like it here in England?"

"Yes, I like it here, with Mrs. Forrester; and in Cornwall. But here
with Mrs. Forrester always seems to me more like the life of Europe.
English life, as a rule, is, I think, rather like boxes one inside the
other." She was perfectly sweet and undogmatic, but her air of
cosmopolitan competence amused Gregory, serenely of opinion, for his
part, that English was the only life.

"Well, the great thing is that the boxes should fit comfortably into one
another, isn't it," he observed; "and I think that on the whole we've
come to fit pretty well in England. And we all come out of our boxes,
don't we,