aineer,
who still bent on one knee on the hearth, watching with smiling eyes
the triumphs of his fire-making. It seemed to him afterwards that his
judgment was strangely at fault; he perceived naught of import in the
shallow brightness of the young man's eyes, like the polished surface of
jet; in the instability of his jealousy, his anger; in his hap-hazard,
mercurial temperament. Once he might have noted how flat were the
spaces beneath the eyes, how few were the lines that defined the lid,
the socket, the curve of the cheekbone, the bridge of the nose, and how
expressionless. It was doubtless the warmth and glow of the fire,
the clinging desire of companionship, the earnest determination to be
content, pathetic in one who had but little reason for optimism, that
caused him to ignore the vacillating glancing moods that successively
swayed Keenan, strong while they lasted, but with scanty augury because
of their evanescence. He was like some newly discovered property in
physics of untried potentialities, of which nothing is ascertained but
its uncertainties.

And yet he seemed to Dundas a simple country fellow, good-natured in the
main, unsuspicious, and helpful. So, giving a long sigh of relief and
fatigue, Dundas sank down in one of the large arm-chairs that had once
done duty for the summer loungers on the piazza.

In the light of the fire Emory was once more looking at him. A certain
air of distinction, a grace and ease of movement, an indescribable
quality of bearing which he could not discriminate, yet which he
instinctively recognized as superior, offended him in some sort. He
noticed again the ring on the stranger's hand as he drew off his glove.
Gloves! Emory Keen an would as soon have thought of wearing a petticoat.
Once more the fear that these effeminate graces found favor in
Millicent's estimation smote upon his heart. It made the surface of his
opaque eyes glisten as Dundas rose and took up a pipe and tobacco-pouch
which he had laid on the mantelpiece, his full height and fine figure
shown in the changed posture.

"Ez tall ez me, ef not taller, an', by gum! a good thirty pound
heavier," Emory reflected, with, a growing dismay that he had not those
stalwart claims to precedence in height and weight as an offset to the
smoother fascinations of the stranger's polish.

He had risen hastily to his feet. He would not linger to smoke
fraternally over the fire, and thus cement friendly relations.

"I guided