"I am an overgrown, awkward lummix," he said airily. "The boys called me 'beanpole' at college."
"You are not an awkward lummix, as you call yourself,—though what a lummix is I have not the slightest notion. Mayhap if you stood long enough you might grow shorter. They say men do,—as they become older." She ran a cool, amused eye over his long, well-proportioned figure, taking in the butter-nut coloured trousers, the foppish waistcoat, the high-collared blue coat, and the handsome brown-thatched head that topped the whole creation. He was almost a head taller than she, and yet she was well above medium height.
"How old are you?" she asked, abruptly. Again she was serious, unsmiling.
"Twenty-five," he replied, looking down into her dark, inquiring eyes with something like eagerness in his own. He was saying over and over again to himself that never had he seen any one so lovely as she. "I am six years older than you. Somehow, I feel that I am younger. Rather odd, is it not?"
"Six years," she mused, looking into the fire. The glow of the blazing logs cast changing, throbbing shadows across her face, now soft and dusky, like velvet, under the warm caress of the firelight. "Sometimes I feel much older than nineteen," she went on, shaking her head as if puzzled. "I remember that I was supposed to be very large for my age when I was a little girl. Everybody commented on my size. I used to be ashamed of my great, gawky self. But," she continued, shrugging her pretty shoulders, "that was ages ago."
He drew a step nearer and leaned an elbow on the mantel.
"You say you knew my father," he said, haltingly. "What was he like?"
She raised her eyes quickly and for an instant studied his face curiously, as if searching for something that baffled her understanding.
"He was very tall," she said in a low voice. "As tall as you are."
"I have only a dim recollection of him," he said. "You see, I made my home with my grandparents after I was five years old." He did not offer any further information. "As a tiny lad I remember wishing that I might grow up to be as big as my father. Did you know him well?"