She radiated a subtle promise of perfect companionship. Price Ruyler did
what all men will do until the end of time. He made up his mind that he
had found his woman and without vocal assistance.

Mrs. Thornton, who had been watching the unusual mobility of his face,
met his eyes with a satirical smile in her own, her thin red curling lips
drawn almost straight for a moment. She had played with the fancy, before
anger banished it, that if she had been twenty years younger.... Men had
fallen madly in love with her in her own day.... She detected the
symptoms in this man at once. Her savage will compelled her to accept
accumulating years without a concession. But she had forgotten nothing.

Ruyler may have read her thoughts.

"You know," he said, with an attempt at lightness, although the coast
wind tan, which was his only claim to coloring, had paled a little, "that
girl reminds me so much of you that I have made up my mind to marry her.
I don't care who she is. If you don't help me to meet her conventionally
I'll manage somehow, but I should hate to practice any subterfuges on the
woman I intend to make my wife."

For a moment he had the sensation of being pinned to the wall by that
narrow concentrated gaze. Then Mrs. Thornton swung on her heel. "I'll do
it," she said.

She walked across the room with the supple grace her slender figure had
never lost and sat down beside the older woman. In a moment the
astonished dowagers who had "suffered from her fiendish temper all
evening," saw her talking with spontaneous graciousness to both the
strangers. Madame Delano was at first more distant and reserved than Mrs.