ere
young men are at a premium should have noticed this one particularly
and expected a like interest on his part. The inexplicable Jelnik
failed to exhibit it. There was but one house that he visited, and
that was Hynds House.

Whatever his reasons for this may have been, and the town named
several, the fact remains that Hynds House would never have been so
beautiful, the restoration wouldn't have been so nearly perfect, had
it not been for the critical taste of Mr. Jelnik. He had the
European knowledge of beautiful things, and, toward the finer graces
of life, the attitude of Paris, of Rome, of Vienna, rather than of
New York, of Chicago, or of, say, Atlanta.

There was a glamour about the man. Whatever he did or said had an
indefinable, delightful significance; what he left undone was full
of meaning. His mere presence ornamented and colored common moments
so that they glowed, and remained in the memory with a rainbow light
upon them. He was never hurried or flurried, any more than sun and
sky and trees and tides are; and he was just as vital, and quite as
baffling.

We accepted him at first as part of the fairy-story into which
Destiny had pitchforked us. He belonged to Hynds House, so to speak,
and there one might meet him upon common ground. But sometimes when
I happened to glance up I would find him watching us with those
reflective eyes that were so full of light and at the same time so
inscrutable. And then he would smile, his Dionysiac smile that made
him all at once so far off and so foreign that I knew, with a
sinking heart, that he didn't belong at all; that this beautiful and
brilliant bird of passage was lightening for but a very brief space
my sober skies.

Alicia said he made her think of peacocks and ivory. He delighted
and dazzled her, though he did not disquiet her as he did me,
perhaps because she, too, was young and beautiful, and I--wasn't.

It will be seen, then, that our position, take it by and large,
wasn't one that called for flags and buntings. Life didn't look a
bit rose-colored to me as I sat there that night, drafting a letter
to the Head. Of a sudden arose clamor in the hall, and howls,
hideously loud at that hour and in that quiet house. There came the
noise of running feet, and there burst into the lighted library,
with gray faces and rolling eyes, our two lately acquired colored
maids, Fernolia the thin one, and Queen of Sheba, fat and brown.

"Good heavens! What's the matter