The Coast of Chance | Page 9

was Ella Buller's conversation. It
had color, that voice; it had a quality so sharp, so individual that it
touched her with a mischievous wonder that he dared speak so
differently from all the world about him. Then, six pictures away, she
heard her own name.
"Why, Flora Gilsey!" It was Ella's husky, boyish note. "I've been
looking for you all the evening! How d'y'do, Harry?" She waved her
hand at him. "Why, how d'y'do, Mrs. Britton? I wouldn't let papa go to
supper until I'd found you. 'Papa,' I said, 'wait; Flora and Harry will be
here.' Besides," she had quite reached Flora's side by this time and
communicated it in an impressive whisper, "I want you to meet my

Englishman." She looked over her shoulder, and largely beckoned to
where the blunt and florid Buller and his companion, with their backs
to what they were supposed to be looking at, were exchanging an
anecdote of infinite amusement.
Buller's expression came around slowly to his daughter's beckoning
hand, but the Englishman's face seemed to flash at the instant from
what he was enjoying to what was expected of him. In the flourish of
introductions, across and across, Flora found herself thinking the reality
less extraordinary than she had at first supposed. Now that Mr. Kerr
was fairly before her, presented to her, and taking her in with the same
lively, impersonal interest with which he took in the whole room, "as
if," she put it vexedly to herself, "I were a specimen poked at him on
the end of a pin," it stirred in her a vague resentment; and involuntarily
she held him up to Harry. The comparison showed him a little worn, a
little battered, a little too perfunctory in manner; but his genial eyes,
deep under threatening brows, made Harry's eyes seem to stare rather
coldly; and the fine form of his long, plain face, and the sensitive line
of his long thin lips made Harry's beauty look,--well, how did it look?
Hardly callous.
This mixed impression the two men gave her was disconcerting. She
was all the more ready to be wary of the stranger. She had begun with
him in the way she did with every one--instinctively throwing out a
breastwork of conversation from behind which she could observe the
enemy. But though he had blinked at it, he had not taken her up, nor
helped her out; but had merely stood with his head a little canted
forward, as if he watched her through her defenses.
"But San Francisco must seem so limited after London," she had
wound up; and the way he had considered it, a little humorously, down
his long nose, made her doubt the interest of cities to be reckoned in
round numbers.
"It's all extraordinary," he said. "You're quite as extraordinary in your
way as we in ours."
"Oh," she wondered, still vexed with his inventory, "I had always

supposed us awfully commonplace. What is our way, please?"
"Ah," he said, measuring his long step to hers as they sauntered a little,
"for one thing, you're so awfully good to a fellow. In London"--and he
nodded back, as if London were merely across the room--"they're
awfully good to the somebodies. It's the way you take in the nobodies
over here that is so astonishing--the stray leaves that blow in with your
'trade,' and can't show any credentials but a letter or two, and their faces;
and those"--his diablerie danced out again--"sometimes such deucedly
damaged ones."
It was almost indecent, this parade of his nonentity! She wanted to say,
"Oh, hush! Those are the things one only enjoys--never talks about."
But instead, somewhere up at the top of her voice, she said: "Oh, we
always lock up our silver!"
"But even then," he quizzed her, "I wonder how you dare to do it?"
"Perhaps we have to, because we ourselves are all--" ("without any
credentials but those you mention,") she had been about to say--but
there she caught herself on the very edge of giving herself and all the
rest of them away to him; "--all so awfully bored," she mischievously
ended with the daintiest, faintest possible yawn behind her spread fan.
He looked as if she had taken him by surprise; then laughed out. "Oh,
that is the way they don't do here," he provoked her. "You mustn't,
when I'm not expecting it."
"Then what are you expecting?" she inquired a little coolly.
"Well," he deliberated, "not expecting you to get me ready for a sweet,
and then pop in a pickle; and presently expecting, hoping, anxiously
anticipating, what you really care to say."
He was expecting, she looked maliciously, more than he was likely to
get; but the fact that he did see through her to that extent was at once