bowed profoundly in honor of the colonel's compliments, and brought one
of the stools to a place where it was no nearer the rather ominous
circle of the lamplight than was the invalid himself. With his eyes
accustomed to the new light, Donnegan could now take better stock of his
host. He saw a rather handsome face, with eyes exceedingly blue, young,
and active; but the features of Macon as well as his body were blurred
and obscured by a great fatness. He was truly a prodigious man, and one
could understand the stoutness with which the invalid chair was made.
His great wrist dimpled like the wrist of a healthy baby, and his face
was so enlarged with superfluous flesh that the lower part of it quite
dwarfed the upper. He seemed, at first glance, a man with a low forehead
and bright, careless eyes and a body made immobile by flesh and
sickness. A man whose spirits despised and defied pain. Yet a second
glance showed that the forehead was, after all, a nobly proportioned
one, and for all the bulk of that figure, for all the cripple-chair,
Donnegan would not have been surprised to see the bulk spring lightly
out of the chair to meet him.

For his own part, sitting back on the stool with his cap tucked under
his arm and his hands folded about one knee, he met the faint, cold
smile of the colonel with a broad grin of his own.

"I can put it in a nutshell," said Donnegan. "I was tired; dead beat;
needed a handout, and rapped at your door. Along comes a mystery in the
shape of an ugly-looking woman and opens the door to me. Tries to shut
me out; I decided to come in. She insists on keeping me outside; all at
once I see that I have to get into the house. I am brought in; your
daughter tries to steer me off, sees that the job is more than she can
get away with, and shelves me off upon you. And that, Colonel Macon, is
the pleasant accident which brings you the favor of this call."