At luncheon he sat at a little table by a window, alone, indolently preoccupied with a newspaper and a fruit salad. She, across the room, kept her troubled eyes away. Yet it was as though she saw him—perhaps the mental embodiment of him was the more vivid for her resolutely averted head.
Every detail of his appearance was painfully familiar to her—his dark eyes, his smooth face which always seemed a trifle sun-tanned, the fastidious and perfect taste of his dress in harmony with his boyish charm and quiet distinction—and the youth of him—the wholesome and self-possessed youth—that seemed to her the most dreadful thing about him in the new light of her knowledge. For he could scarcely be twenty-five.
Every movement he made had long since fascinated her; his unconscious grace had been, to her, the unstudied assurance of a man of the world bred to a social environment about which she knew only through reading.
Never had she seen him but straightway she began to wonder who and what exalted person in the unknown metropolitan social circle he might be.
She had often wondered, speculated; sometimes dreamily she had endowed him with name and position—with qualities, too—ideal qualities suggested by his air of personal distinction—delightful qualities suggested by his dark, pleasant eyes, and by the slight suspicion of humour lurking so often on the edges of his smoothly shaven lips.
He was so clean-looking, so nice—and he had the shoulders and the hands and the features of good breeding! And, after all—after all, he was a gambler!—a derelict whose sinister living was gained by his wits; a trailer and haunter and bleeder of men! Worse—a decoy sent out by others!
She had little appetite for luncheon; he seemed to have less. But she remembered that she had never seen him eat very much—and never drink anything stronger than tea.
"At least," she thought with a mental quiver, "he has that to his credit."
The quiver surprised her; she was scarcely prepared for any emotion concerning him except the natural shock of disillusion and the natural pity of a young girl for anything ignoble and hopelessly unworthy.
Hopelessly? She wondered. Was it possible that God could ever find the means of grace for such a man? It could be done, of course; it were a sin for her to doubt it. Yet she could not see how.
