"How _can_ they be soft and firm, too, Mr. Gatewood?" she protested;
then, surprising his guilty eyes fixed on her hands, hastily dropped
them and sat up straight, level-browed, cold as marble. _Was_ he
deliberately being rude to her?




CHAPTER IV


As a matter of fact, he was not. Too poor in imagination to invent, on
the spur of the moment, charms and qualities suited to his ideal, he
had, at first unconsciously, taken as a model the girl before him; quite
unconsciously and innocently at first--then furtively, and with a
dawning perception of the almost flawless beauty he was secretly
plagiarizing. Aware, now, that something had annoyed her; aware, too, at
the same moment that there appeared to be nothing lacking in her to
satisfy his imagination of the ideal, he began to turn redder than he
had ever turned in all his life.

Several minutes of sixty seconds each ensued before he ventured to stir
a finger. And it was only when she bent again very gravely over her pad
that he cautiously eased a cramped muscle or two, and drew a breath--a
long, noiseless, deep and timid respiration. He realized the enormity of
what he had been doing--how close he had come to giving unpardonable
offense by drawing a perfect portrait of her as the person he desired to
find through the good offices of Keen & Co.

But there was no such person--unless she had a double: for what more