Soldiers of Fortune | Page 5

old gentleman with a passion for golf, a passion in which he
had for a long time been endeavoring to interest her. She answered him
and his enthusiasm in kind, and with as much apparent interest as she
would have shown in a matter of state. It was her principle to be all
things to all men, whether they were great artists, great diplomats, or
great bores. If a man had been pleading with her to leave the
conservatory and run away with him, and another had come up
innocently and announced that it was his dance, she would have said:
``Oh, is it?'' with as much apparent delight as though his coming had
been the one bright hope in her life.
She was growing enthusiastic over the delights of golf and
unconsciously making a very beautiful picture of herself in her interest
and forced vivacity, when she became conscious for the first time of a
strange young man who was standing alone before the fireplace looking
at her, and frankly listening to all the nonsense she was talking. She
guessed that he had been listening for some time, and she also saw,
before he turned his eyes quickly away, that he was distinctly amused.
Miss Langham stopped gesticulating and lowered her voice, but
continued to keep her eyes on the face of the stranger, whose own eyes
were wandering around the room, to give her, so she guessed, the idea
that he had not been listening, but that she had caught him at it in the

moment he had first looked at her. He was a tall, broad- shouldered
youth, with a handsome face, tanned and dyed, either by the sun or by
exposure to the wind, to a deep ruddy brown, which contrasted
strangely with his yellow hair and mustache, and with the pallor of the
other faces about him. He was a stranger apparently to every one
present, and his bearing suggested, in consequence, that ease of manner
which comes to a person who is not only sure of himself, but who has
no knowledge of the claims and pretensions to social distinction of
those about him. His most attractive feature was his eyes, which
seemed to observe all that was going on, not only what was on the
surface, but beneath the surface, and that not rudely or covertly but
with the frank, quick look of the trained observer. Miss Langham found
it an interesting face to watch, and she did not look away from it. She
was acquainted with every one else in the room, and hence she knew
this must be the cowboy of whom Mrs. Porter had spoken, and she
wondered how any one who had lived the rough life of the West could
still retain the look when in formal clothes of one who was in the habit
of doing informal things in them.
Mrs. Porter presented her cowboy simply as ``Mr. Clay, of whom I
spoke to you,'' with a significant raising of the eyebrows, and the
cowboy made way for King, who took Miss Langham in. He looked
frankly pleased, however, when he found himself next to her again, but
did not take advantage of it throughout the first part of the dinner,
during which time he talked to the young married woman on his right,
and Miss Langham and King continued where they had left off at their
last meeting. They knew each other well enough to joke of the way in
which they were thrown into each other's society, and, as she said, they
tried to make the best of it. But while she spoke, Miss Langham was
continually conscious of the presence of her neighbor, who piqued her
interest and her curiosity in different ways. He seemed to be at his ease,
and yet from the manner in which he glanced up and down the table
and listened to snatches of talk on either side of him he had the
appearance of one to whom it was all new, and who was seeing it for
the first time.
There was a jolly group at one end of the long table, and they wished to

emphasize the fact by laughing a little more hysterically at their
remarks than the humor of those witticisms seemed to justify. A
daughter-in-law of Mrs. Porter was their leader in this, and at one point
she stopped in the middle of a story and waving her hand at the double
row of faces turned in her direction, which had been attracted by the
loudness of her voice, cried, gayly, ``Don't listen. This is for private
circulation. It is not a jeune-fille story.'' The debutantes at the table
continued talking again in steady, even tones, as though they had not
heard the remark or the first