Then, getting his first near view of her, his eyes widened.  He had never seen anything just like her; with that he began realizing dully that he was straying into strange pastures.  He took her two hands because there was nothing else to do, feeling just a trifle awkward in the unaccustomed act.  He looked down into Gloria’s face, which was lifted so artlessly up to his.  Hers were the softest, tenderest grey eyes he had ever looked into.  He had the uneasy fear that his hard rough hands were rasping the fine soft skin of hers.  Yet there was a warm pleasurable thrill in the contact.  Gloria was very much alive and warm-bodied and beautiful.  She was like those flowers which King knew so well, fragrant dainty blossoms which lift their little faces from the highest of the old mountains into the rarest of skies, growths seeming to partake of some celestial perfection; hardy, though they clothed themselves in an outward seeming of fragile delicacy. Physically—­he emphasized the word and barricaded himself behind it as though he were on the defence against her!—­she came nearer perfection than he had thought a girl could come, and nowhere did he find a conflicting detail from the tendril of sunny brown hair touching the curve of the sweet young face to the little feet in their clicking high-heeled shoes.  Thus from the beginning he thought of her in superlatives.  And thus did Gloria, like the springtime coquetting with an aloof and silent wilderness, make her bright entry into Mark King’s life.

“I have been acting-up like a Comanche Indian outside,” laughed Gloria.  It was she who withdrew her hands; King started inwardly, wondering how long he had been holding them, how long he would have held them if she had not been so serenely mistress of the moment.  “My hair was all tumbling down and I had to run upstairs to fight it back where it belongs.  Isn’t a girl’s hair a terrible affliction, Mr. King?  One of these days, when papa’s back is turned, I’m going to cut it off short, like a boy’s.”

An explanation of her presence in the house while her guests were still in the yard; why explain so trifling a matter?  A suggestion that she retained that lustrous crown of hair just to please her papa, whereas one who had not been told might have been mistaken in his belief that this should be one of her greatest prides.  Two little fibs for Miss Gloria; yet, certainly, very small fibs which hurt no one.

Gloria’s eyes, despite their soft tenderness, were every whit as quick as Mark King’s when they were, as now, intrigued.  Of course both she and King had heard countless references, one of the other, from Ben Gaynor, but neither had been greatly interested.  King had known that there was a baby girl, long ago; that fact had been impressed on him with such rare eloquence that it had created a mental picture which, until now, had been vivid and like an indelible drawing; he had known, had he ever paused for reflection, which he had not, that a baby would