CHAPTER IV

FACE TO FACE


It was, Hugh Alston decided, the most beautiful face he had ever seen in
his life and the coldest, or so it seemed to him. She was looking at him
with cool questioning in her grey eyes, her lips drawn to a hard line.

He saw her as she stood before him, and as he saw her now, so would he
carry the memory of the picture she made in his mind for many a day to
come--tall, perhaps a little taller than the average woman, tall by
comparison with Marjorie Linden, brown of hair and grey of eye, with a
disdainfully enquiring look about her.

He was not a man who usually noticed a woman's clothes, yet the picture
impressed on his mind of this girl was a very complete one. She was
wearing a dress that instinct told him was of some cheap material. She
might have bought it ready-made, she might have made it herself, or some
unskilled dressmaker might have turned it out cheaply. Poverty was the
note it struck, her boots were small and neat, well-worn. Yes, poverty
was the keynote to it all.

It was she, womanlike, who broke the silence.

"Well? I am waiting for some explanation of all the extraordinary things
that have been said to me since I have been in this house. You, of
course, heard what Lady Linden said as she left us?"