Her beauty, which usually needed no artificial aid, was striking, and her large dark eyes rested on each in turn with an air of innocent wonder, quickly followed by a pathetic, beseeching little smile that touched the heart of several auditors, even though they deemed it disingenuous.
Maurice Trask, shrewd and calculating, sized her up, as he would have expressed it.
And his sizing up was decidedly complimentary. So much so, in fact, that he almost concluded to take her part against all comers.
“I’m for her,” he said to himself, “and yet,” he added, to the same confidant, “she’s nobody’s fool! That girl knows what she’s about—and by jingo, if she wanted to kill a man, she could kill him! I’ll say she could!”
It was Miss Austin’s dress that caught every one’s eye. Not a person present, among the visitors, but wanted to say, “turn around—oh, do!”
But the girl sank into a low chair beside Saltonstall Adams and quietly awaited developments.
“May I present Mr. Trask,” Cray said, a little awkwardly, for it was not easy to be casual under the glance of those pathetic eyes.
Anita bowed courteously if coldly, and then there was an embarrassing silence.
“Well,” Trask remarked, at last, “you people are not very talkative, guess I’ll take the helm myself. Miss Austin, will you be good enough to get up and turn around?”
The request was so simply made, that, almost without thinking of its strangeness, Anita did exactly as she was asked.