The Coast of Chance | Page 9

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 delightful and alarming. She swayed back into the shadow beyond the dazzling line of light. She wanted to escape his scrutiny, to be able to look him over from a safe vantage-ground. But he wouldn't have it. An instant he stood under the torrent of white radiance, challenging her to see what she could--then followed her into her retreat. "Shall we sit here?" he said, and she found herself hopelessly cut off and isolated with the enemy.
She couldn't withhold a little grudging pleasure in the sharpness with which he had turned her maneuver, and the way it had detached them from the surrounding crowd. For there, in the dusky center of the room, it was as if they watched from safe covert the rest of their party exposed in the glare of light; though not, as Flora presently noted, quite escaping observation themselves. For an instant