until at about quarter to one he was striding gloomily about with
despondent features and melancholy forebodings, imagining a thousand
miserable reasons for her inexplicable delay. A good many people
stared at him as they passed, and we may do so among the number.

In person Frank Crosse was neither tall nor short, five feet eight
and a half to be exact, with the well-knit frame and springy step of
a young man who had been an athlete from his boyhood. He was slim,
but wiry, and carried his head with a half-defiant backward slant
which told of pluck and breed. His face was tanned brown, in spite
of his City hours, but his hair and slight moustache were flaxen, and
his eyes, which were his best features, were of a delicate blue, and
could vary in expression from something very tender to something
particularly hard. He was an orphan, and had inherited nothing from
his parents save a dash of the artist from his mother. It was not
enough to help him to earn a living, but it transformed itself into a
keen appreciation and some ambitions in literature, and it gave a
light and shade to his character which made him rather complex, and
therefore interesting. His best friends could not deny the shade,
and yet it was but the shadow thrown by the light. Strength,
virility, emotional force, power of deep feeling--these are traits
which have to be paid for. There was sometimes just a touch of the
savage, or at least there were indications of the possibility of a
touch of the savage, in Frank Crosse. His intense love of the open
air and of physical exercise was a sign of it. He left upon women
the impression, not altogether unwelcome, that there were unexplored
recesses of his nature to which the most intimate of them had never
penetrated. In those dark corners of the spirit either a saint or a
sinner might be lurking, and there was a pleasurable excitement in
peering into them, and wondering which it was. No woman ever found