outcome of midnight travail, or, like his eloquence on the platform, a
direct flight from the quickened brain. It certainly bore no resemblance
to his amputated table talk. But in a moment she dismissed her
speculations, for she had discovered a quality, overlooked before, but
arresting in the recent light of his cold arrogance and haughty
self-confidence. Behind his strict regard for facts and the keen insight
and large grasp of his subject, which, without his evident care for the
graces, would have distinguished his work from the dry report of equally
conscientious but less gifted men, was the lonely play of a really lofty
imagination, and a noble human sympathy. As she read on, this warm
full-blooded quality, tempered always by reason, grew more and more
visible to her alert sense; and when the fires in his mind blazed forth
into a revelation of a passionate love of beauty, both in nature and in
human character, Isabel realized what such a man's power over his
audience must be; when this second self, so effectually concealed,
suddenly burst into being.

"It is too bad a woman would have to live with the other!" she thought,
as she raised her eyes and saw Gwynne emerge from the woods with Mrs.
Kaye. "I cannot say that I envy her."

"By Jove, they have an engaged look!"

Isabel turned with a start, but greeted Lord Hexam with a smile. He was
as yet her one satisfactory experience of the young English nobleman,
whom, like most American girls, she had unconsciously foreshadowed in
doublet and hose. Hexam was quite six feet, with a fine military
carriage; he had been in the Guards and had not left the army until
after two years of active service; his blue eyes were both honest and
intelligent, and he was generally clean cut and highly bred.

He drew up a chair beside Isabel and reflected that she was even
handsomer than he had thought, with the sunlight warming the ivory
whiteness of her skin, although it contracted the mobile pupils of her
eyes; and that little black moles when rightly placed were more
attractive than he had thought possible. They gave a sort of daring
unconscious eighteenth-century coquetry to what was otherwise a somewhat
severe style of beauty. But he was a man for whom a woman's hair had a
peculiar fascination, and while they were uttering commonplaces at
random his eyes wandered to the soft yet massive coils encircling
Isabel's shapely head, and lingered there.

"Pardon me!" he said, boyishly.