"Teeth?"
"P-p-perfect p-p-pearls!" he stammered. The laughing red mouth closed like a flower at dusk, veiling the sparkle of her teeth.
Was he trying to be impertinent? Was he deliberately describing her? He did not look like that sort of man; yet why was he watching her so closely, so curiously at every question? Why did he look at her teeth when she laughed?
"Eyes?" Her own dared him to continue what, coincidence or not, was plainly a description of herself.
"B-b-b—" He grew suddenly timorous, hesitating, pretending to a perplexity which was really a healthy scare. For she was frowning.
"Curious I can't think of the color of her eyes," he said; "is—isn't it?"
She coldly inspected her pad and made a correction; but all she did was to rub out a comma and put another in its place. Meanwhile, Gatewood, chin in his hand, sat buried in profound thought. "Were they blue?" he murmured to himself aloud, "or were they brown? Blue begins with a b and brown begins with a b. I'm convinced that her eyes began with a b. They were not, therefore, gray or green, because," he added in a burst of confidence, "it is utterly impossible to spell gray or green with a b!"
Miss Southerland looked slightly astonished.
"All you can recollect, then, is that the color of her eyes began with the letter b?"
"That is absolutely all I can remember; but I think they were—brown."