ute, when Avery--still ungracious and still
irritated over something which Eaton could not guess--rather abruptly
left them, she took Avery's seat; and Eaton dropped into his chair
beside her.

Now, this whole proceeding--though within the convention which,
forbidding a girl to make a man's acquaintance directly, says nothing
against her making it through the medium of another man--had been so
unnaturally done that Eaton understood that Harriet Dorne deliberately
had arranged to make his acquaintance, and that Avery, angry and
objecting, had been overruled.

She seemed to Eaton less alertly boyish now than she had looked an hour
before when they had boarded the train. Her cheeks were smoothly
rounded, her lips rather full, her lashes very long. He could not look
up without looking directly at her, for her chair, which had not been
moved since Avery left it, was at an angle with his own. A faint,
sweet fragrance from her hair and clothing came to him and made him
recollect how long it was--five years--since he had talked with, or
even been near, such a girl as this; and the sudden tumult of his
pulses which her nearness caused warned him to keep watch of what he
said until he had learned why she had sought him out.

To avoid the appearance of studying her too openly, he turned slightly,
so that his gaze went past her to the white turmoil outside the windows.

"It's wonderful," she said, "isn't it?"

"You mean the storm?" A twinkle of amusement came to Eaton's eyes.
"It would be more interesting if it allowed a little more to be seen.
At present there is nothing visible but snow."

"Is that the only way it affects you?" She turned to him, apparently a
trifle disappointed.

"I don't exactly understand."

"Why, it must affect every man most as it touches his own interests.
An artist would think of it as a background for contrasts--a thing to
sketch or paint; a writer as something to be written down in words."

Eaton understood. She could not more plainly have asked him what he
was.

"And an engineer, I suppose," he said, easily, "would think of it only
as an element to be included in his formulas--an _x_, or an _a_, or a
_b_, to be put in somewhere and square-rooted or squared so that the
roof-truss he was figuring should not buckle under its weight."

"Oh--so that is the way you were thinking of it?"

"You mean," Eaton challenged her directly, "am I an engineer?"

"Are you?"

"Oh, no; I was only tal