“You sent for me?”
“Go up to the hotel and see this man” (he underscored the name and handed her the proof); “there might be a story in him. He saved somebody’s life out West—his guide’s, as I recall it. Noble-hero story—brave tenderfoot rescuing seasoned Westerner—reversal of the usual picture. Might use his photograph.”
“I’ll try,” as she took the slip. It was characteristic of her not to ask questions, which was one of the several reasons why the city editor approved of her.
“In that event I know we can count on it.” Mr. Peters waited expectantly and was not disappointed.
She was walking away but turned her head and looked back at him over her shoulder. The sudden, sparkling smile changed her face like some wizard’s magic from that of a sober young woman very much in earnest to a laughing, rather mischievous looking little girl of ten or twelve.
There are a few women who even at middle-age have moments when it seems as though the inexorable hand of Time were forced back to childhood by the youthfulness of their spirit. For a minute, or perhaps a second merely, the observer receives a vivid impression of them as they looked before the anxieties and sorrows which come with living had left their imprint.
Helen Dunbar had this trick of expression to a marked degree and for a fleeting second she always looked like a little girl in shoe-top frocks and pigtails. Mr. Peters had noticed it often, and as a student of physiognomy he had found the transformation so fascinating that he had not only watched for it but sometimes endeavored to provoke it. He also reflected now as he looked after her, that her appearance was a credit to the sheet—a comment he was not always able to make upon the transitory ladies of his staff.
The unconscious object of the newspaper’s attention was seated at a desk in the sitting-room of his suite in the Hotel Strathmore, alternately frowning and smiling in the effort of composition.
Mr. Sprudell had a jaunty, colloquial style when he stooped to prose.