"I suspect he was too absorbed." Gathbroke muttered the words, but man's instinct of loyalty to his own sex is strong. "A city doesn't burn every day, you know."
"Still … what is she like? Like him?"
"I do not remember him at all … She? Oh, she has a tremendous amount of dark hair that looks as if falling off the top of her head and down her face. Uncommonly heavy eyebrows, and very light gray—Ah, I have it! I have been groping for the word ever since—sinister eyes…. That is the effect in that dark face. She has a curious character, I should think. Not very frank. She—well, she rather struck me as having been born for drama; tragic drama, I am afraid."
"Not a bit like her brother. How old is she?"
"Twenty-two, she told me."
"What—what does she do? They are not a bit well off."
He hesitated a moment. "Well—as I recall it, she is studying something or other at the University of California."
"And of course she boards down there with her brother, who takes care of her while she is studying to be a teacher or something." Alexina having arranged it to her satisfaction dismissed the subject. She had no mind to betray herself to this good-looking young Englishman who had been sent to her providentially on a very dull day. He would, no doubt, have been frantically interesting if he had not been so idiotic as to fall head over ears the first shot.
Still … Alexina examined him covertly as he transferred his gaze for a moment to the mountains across the distant bay, swimming now in a pale blue mist with a wide banner of pale pink above them…. If she had met him first, or had never met the other at all … who knew?