The Tracer of Lost Persons | Page 8

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."
"If they were brown they must be brown now," she observed, looking
out of the window.
"That's true! Isn't it curious I never thought of that? What are you
writing?"
"Brown," she said, so briefly that it sounded something like a snub.
"Mouth?" inquired the girl, turning a new leaf on her pad.
"Perfect. Write it: there is no other term fit to describe its color, shape,
its sensitive beauty, its--What did you write just then?"
"I wrote, 'Mouth, ordinary.'"
"I don't want you to! I want--"
"Really, Mr. Gatewood, a rhapsody on a girl's mouth is proper in poetry,
but scarcely germane to the record of a purely business transaction.

Please answer the next question tersely, if you don't mind: 'Figure?'"
"Oh, I do mind! I can't! Any poem is much too brief to describe her
figure--"
"Shall we say 'Perfect'?" asked the girl, raising her brown eyes in a
glimmering transition from vexation to amusement. For, after all, it
could be only a coincidence that this young man should be describing
features peculiar to herself.
"Couldn't you write, 'Venus-of-Milo-like'?" he inquired. "That is
laconic."
"I could--if it's true. But if you mean it for praise--I--don't think any
modern woman would be flattered."
"I always supposed that she of Milo had an ideal figure," he said,
perplexed.
She wrote, "A good figure." Then, propping her rounded chin on one
lovely white hand, she glanced at the next question:
"Hands?"
"White, beautiful, rose-tipped, slender yet softly and firmly rounded--"
"How can they be soft and firm, too, Mr. Gatewood?" she protested;
then, surprising his guilty eyes fixed on her hands, hastily dropped
them and sat up straight, level-browed, cold as marble. Was he
deliberately being rude to her?
CHAPTER IV
As a matter of fact, he was not. Too poor in imagination to invent, on
the spur of the moment, charms and qualities suited to his ideal, he had,
at first unconsciously, taken as a model the girl before him; quite
unconsciously and innocently at first--then furtively, and with a
dawning perception of the almost flawless beauty he was secretly

plagiarizing. Aware, now, that something had annoyed her; aware, too,
at the same moment that there appeared to be nothing lacking in her to
satisfy his imagination of the ideal, he began to turn redder than he had
ever turned in all his life.
Several minutes of sixty seconds each ensued before he ventured to stir
a finger. And it was only when she bent again very gravely over her
pad that he cautiously eased a cramped muscle or two, and drew a
breath--a long, noiseless, deep and timid respiration. He realized the
enormity of what he had been doing--how close he had come to giving
unpardonable offense by drawing a perfect portrait of her as the person
he desired to find through the good offices of Keen & Co.
But there was no such person--unless she had a double: for what more
could a man desire than the ideal traits he had been able to describe
only by using her as his inspiration.
When he ventured to look at her, one glance was enough to convince
him that she, too, had noticed the parallel--had been forced to recognize
her own features in the portrait he had constructed of an ideal. And she
had caught him in absent-minded contemplation of the hands he had
been describing. He knew that his face was the face of a guilty man.
"What is the next question?" he stammered, eager to answer it in a
manner calculated to allay her suspicions.
"The next question?" She glanced at the list, then with a voice of velvet
which belied the eyes, clear as frosty brown pools in November: "The
next question requires a description of her feet."
"Feet! Oh---they--they're rather large--why, her feet are enormous, I
believe--"
She looked at him as though stunned; suddenly a flood of pink spread,
wave on wave, from the white nape of her neck to her hair; she bent
low over her pad and wrote something, remaining in that attitude until
her face cooled.

"Somehow or other I've done it again!" he thought, horrified. "The best
thing I can do is