"I have never," he said, "seen you look better."
She laughed. After all, one might permit a touch of coquetry in the final renouncement! "Perhaps you have never really seen me before."
Though he looked puzzled, he responded gaily: "On the contrary, I have seen little else for the last two or three months."
There was an edge of irony to her smile. "Were you looking at me or my shadow?"
He shook his head. "Are shadows ever as brilliant as that?"
Then before she could answer the Judge came in with his cordial outstretched hand and his air of humorous urbanity, as if he were too much interested in the world to censure it, and yet too little interested to take it seriously. His face, with its thin austere features and its kindly expression, showed the dryness that comes less from age than from quality. Benham, looking at him closely, thought, "He must be well over eighty, but he hasn't changed so much as a hair of his head in the last twenty years."
At dinner Corinna was very gay; and her father, whose habit it was not to inquire too deeply, observed only that she was looking remarkably well. The dining-room was lighted by candles which flickered gently in the breeze that rose and fell on the terrace. In this wavering illumination innumerable little shadows, like ghosts of butterflies, played over the faces of the two men, whose features were so much alike and whose expressions differed so perversely. In both Nature had bred a type; custom and tradition had moulded the plastic substance and refined the edges; but, stronger than either custom or tradition, the individual temperament, the inner spirit of each man, had cast the transforming flame and shadow over the outward form. And now they were alike only in their long, graceful figures, in their thin Roman features, in their general air of urbane distinction.
"We were talking at the club of the strike," said the Judge, who had finished his soup with a manner of detachment, and sat now gazing thoughtfully at his glass of sherry. "The opinion seems to be that it depends upon Vetch."
Benham's voice sounded slightly sardonical. "How can anything depend upon a weathercock?"
"Well, there's a chance, isn't there, that the weather may decide it?"