As he entered the crowd overflowing on the bottom of the stairway, he caught a glimpse of Sir Henry Dercum and the girl in an eddy beyond where the great newel post turned. Dercum’s big shoulders would be anywhere conspicuous. He was a massive Englishman, with a wide, Oriental face, purpled by good feeding, and little reptilian eyes under heavy lids that very nearly obscured them. The man had a habit of lifting his head when he was very much concerned, as though to get a better view of his subject without the effort or the danger of raising his eyelids.
The girl before him was in the splendid lure of youth; her dark hair was lifted, by some subtlety of the coiffeur’s art, into a beautiful, soft background for her face; her dark eyes and her delicate skin were exquisitely brought out by it. She was in the first bud of life, and she was very lovely. But there was more than mere physical beauty; there was the charm of inexperience, the charm of adventurous youth that does not question, and, like charity, believeth all things—that inexperience which is gayly ready for any adventure into what it beautifully imagines to be a fairy world.
The Secret Service agent saw the expression bedded into Dercum’s heavy face, and he knew what it meant. He heard also the sentence he was speaking.
“You will need a bit of change from all this artificiality.”
“Do I look stale so soon, Sir Henry?”
The girl laughed.
His eyes traveled over her, his head thrown back in a slow, heavy-lidded expression as though it were a physical caress.
“Ah, no,” he said; “but you will have inherited some of your father’s interest in the waste places of the earth. How would you like to go with me and find a lost river?”
“I should love it,” she said. “Where is your lost river, Sir Henry?”
He looked about him.