Donnegan was now hardly a pace away; and he saw that she lived up to all the promise of that first glance.  Yet still she seemed unreal.  There is a quality of the unearthly about a girl’s beauty; it is, after all, only a gay moment between the formlessness of childhood and the hardness of middle age.  This girl was pale, Donnegan saw, and yet she had color.  She had the luster, say, of a white rose, and the same bloom.  Lou, the old woman had called her, and Macon was her father’s name.  Lou Macon—­the name fitted her, Donnegan thought.  For that matter, if her name had been Sally Smith, Donnegan would probably have thought it beautiful.  The keener a man’s mind is and the more he knows about men and women and the ways of the world, the more apt he is to be intoxicated by a touch of grace and thoughtfulness; and all these age-long seconds the perfume of girlhood had been striking up to Donnegan’s brain.

She brushed her timidity away and with the same gesture accepted Donnegan as something more than a dangerous vagrant.  She took the lamp from the hands of the crone and sent her about her business, disregarding the mutterings and the warnings which trailed behind the departing form.  Now she faced Donnegan, screening the light from her eyes with a cupped hand and by the same device focusing it upon the face of Donnegan.  He mutely noted the small maneuver and gave her credit; but for the pleasure of seeing the white of her fingers and the way they tapered to a pink transparency at the tips, he forgot the poor figure he must make with his soiled, ragged shirt, his unshaven face, his gaunt cheeks.

Indeed, he looked so straight at her that in spite of her advantage with the light she had to avoid his glance.

“I am sorry,” said Lou Macon, “and ashamed because we can’t take you in.  The only house on the range where you wouldn’t be welcome, I know.  But my father leads a very close life; he has set ways.  The ways of an invalid, Mr. Donnegan.”

“And you’re bothered about speaking to him of me?”

“I’m almost afraid of letting you go in yourself.”

“Let me take the risk.”

She considered him again for a moment, and then turned with a nod and he followed her up the stairs into the upper hall.  The moment they stepped into it he heard her clothes flutter and a small gale poured on them.  It was criminal to allow such a building to fall into this ruinous condition.  And a gloomy picture rose in Donnegan’s mind of the invalid, thin-faced, sallow-eyed, white-haired, lying in his bed listening to the storm and silently gathering bitterness out of the pain of living.  Lou Macon paused again in the hall, close to a door on the right.

“I’m going to send you in to speak to my father,” she said gravely.  “First I have to tell you that he’s different.”