The President | Page 4

and then down the wide staircase in front of
him a winsome girl came tumbling.
With a dexterity born of a youth more or less replete of football,
Richard sprang forward and caught the girl in his arms. He caught and
held her as though she were feather-light; and that feat of a brutal
strength, even through her fright, worked upon the saved one, who,
remembering her one hundred and thirty pounds, did not think herself
down of thistles.
"Are you hurt?" asked Richard, still holding her lightly close.
Richard looked at the girl; black hair, white skin, lashes of ink, eyes of
blue, rose-leaf lips, teeth white as rice, a spot of red in her cheeks--the
last the fruit of fright, no doubt. He had never seen aught so beautiful!
Even while she was in his arms, the face fitted into his heart like a
picture into its frame, and Richard thought on that prophet of Calicut.
"Are you injured?" he asked again.
"Thanks to you--no," said the girl.
With a kind of modest energy, she took herself out of his arms, for
Richard had held to her stoutly, and might have been holding her until
now had she not come to her own rescue. For all that, she had leisure to
admire the steel-like grasp and the deep, even voice. Her own words as
she replied came in gasps.
"No," she repeated, "I'm not injured. Help me to a seat."
The beautiful rescued one limped, and Richard turned white.
"Your ankle!" he exclaimed.
"No; my heel," she retorted with a little flutter of a laugh. "My French
heel caught on the stair; it was torn away. No wonder I limp!"
Then came the girl's mother and called her "Dorothy."

Richard, who was not without presence of mind, climbed six steps and
secretly made prize of the baby boot-heel. Perhaps you will think he
did this on the argument by which an Indian takes a scalp. Whatever
the argument, he placed the sweet trophy over that heart which held the
picture of the girl; once there, the boot-heel showed bulgingly foolish
through his coat.
Richard returned to the mother and daughter; the latter had regained her
poise. He introduced himself: "Mr. Richard Storms." The mother gave
him her card: "Mrs. John Harley." She added:
"My name is Hanway-Harley, and this is my daughter, Dorothy Harley.
Hanway is my own family name; I always use it." Then she thanked
Richard for his saving interference in her child's destinies. "Just to
think!" she concluded, and a curdling horror gathered in her tones.
"Dorothy, you might have broken your nose!"
Richard ran a glance over Mrs. Hanway-Harley. She was not coarse,
but was superficial--a woman of inferior ideals. He marveled how a
being so fine as the daughter could have had a no more silken source,
and hugged the boot-heel. The daughter was a flower, the mother a
weed. He decided that the superiority of Dorothy was due to the father,
and gave that absent gentleman a world of credit without waiting to
make his acquaintance.
Mrs. Hanway-Harley said that she lived in Washington. Where did Mr.
Storms live?
"My home has been nowhere for ten years," returned Richard. Then, as
he looked at Dorothy, while his heart took a firmer grip on the picture:
"But I shall live in Washington in a few months."
Dorothy, the saved, beneath whose boot-heel beat Richard's heart,
looked up, and in the blue depths--so Richard thought--shone pleasure
at the news. He could not be certain, for when the blue eyes met the
gray ones, they fell to a furtive consideration of the floor.
"You are to take a house in Washington," said Richard to Mr. Gwynn

an hour later.
Mr. Gwynn bowed.
You who read will now come back to that snow-filled day in November.
Richard relocked his dear boot-heel in the casket; eleven and Matzai
had entered the room together. Matzai laid out Richard's clothes, down
to pin and puff tie. Richard shook off his bathrobe skin and shone forth
in a sleeveless undershirt and a pair of those cotton trousers, cut short
above the knee, which dramatic usage ascribes to fishermen and
buccaneers.
As Richard stood erect, shoulders wide as a viking's, chest arched like
the deck of a whale-back, he might have been a model for the Farnese
Hercules, if that demigod were slimmed down by training and ten years
off his age. He of Farnese should be about forty, if one may go by
looks, while Richard was but thirty. Also, Richard's arms, muscled to
the wrists and as long as a Pict's, would have been out of drawing from
standpoints of ancient art. One must rescue Richard's head; it was not
that nubbin of a head which goes with the Farnese one.