He would now have to meet Mary Burton under the most inauspicious
circumstances, and she would always remember that he had first seen her
with tear-stained eyes at a moment of humiliation and defeat. It was too
much to expect that a woman could forget this, and the young secretary
had the wish that it should be otherwise. So he sat rather moodily
contemplating his plate and when he heard steps on the stairs he was
surprised at the brevity of the interval. Hamilton Burton had evidently
subdued this insurrection in his household with the same whirlwind
swiftness that he employed toward enemies beyond his walls.

Bristoll saw the young financier draw back the portières and he himself
rose hastily and came forward, but he halted half-way and stood
transfixed. He had been told that he was to expect beauty, and he had
expected it, yet now for the moment he found himself standing
astonished, and as devoid as a raw schoolboy of his usually
imperturbable poise. From this trance-like condition he was recalled by
the quizzical amusement of his employer and, bowing from the hips, he
found himself murmuring some well-bred inanity.

The girl standing there in the door was a sight to make men gasp and
lose their tongues, and because this was not the first who had done so,
her own perfect lips curved into a smile of purest graciousness, and in
her voice as she spoke was a quality of zylophone music made the more
charming by that slight French accent which years abroad had given her.
Beauty is so variant of type, so often vaunted and so rarely found in
true perfectness, that Carl Bristoll had accepted the newspaper reports
of this girl's loveliness with a discounted credence. Now he was
convinced. The quality of her coloring and expression would have made
her face beautiful even had it lacked its allurement of line and