for her looks—­she possessed that indescribable charm which is not wholly a matter of beautiful features, but lies rather in such details as the lift of the eyebrow, the curve of the lip, the droop of the hair upon the brow.  She was dressed much more simply than either of the older women present, yet with the simplicity, it must be admitted, of the artist.  She seemed somehow to make their goodly showing fade before her own, as a crimson flower draws from the colour of one of delicate blue.

Well, take them separately or as a group, they were an absorbing study to the man who had seen so little of their kind for so long past, yet knew that kind by the wontedness of his lifetime.  He seemed to himself somehow to be viewing them all, for the first time, from a vantage point he had never before occupied.  Every word they said in their pleasantly modulated, well-bred voices, with the familiar accent of the educated environment from which they came, and from which he came—­it was his accent, too, but somehow it sounded a bit foreign to him tonight—­struck upon his ear with a new meaning.  Each gesture they made, personal and familiar to him as they were, struck Brown now with its special individuality.

“It’s not fair, Don,” said Sue Breckenridge suddenly, “for you to stand over there in the shadow and watch us, without our being able to see your face at all.”

“You don’t realize,” declared Brown, in answer to this assertion and the general assenting, laugh which followed it, backed by Atchison’s.  “Hear, hear!” “that the group you all make in the light of my fire is a picture far ahead of anything in Atchison’s collection.  I should be an unappreciative host indeed if I didn’t make the most of it.”

“What an artful speech!” laughed Mrs. Brainard, lifting fine eyes in an attempt to make out the shadowy face above her.  “It’s well calculated to distract our attention from the fact that you are not changing your position by so much as the moving of an arm.  We came to see you, man, not to show ourselves to you.”

“We came to cheer his loneliness,” put in Hugh Breckenridge with a peculiar, cynical-sounding little laugh for which he was famous.  “And we find him up to his neck in boys.  Jove!  How do you stand their dirty hands, Don?  That’s what would get me, no matter how good my intentions were.”

“Those hands were every pair scrubbed to a finish, to-day, in honour of Thanksgiving.  Do you think we have no manners here?” retorted Brown.

“That wasn’t the dinner party you wrote me of when you refused to come to mine, was it, Don?” questioned his sister.

“No.  This was an after-dinner party, partaking of the ‘lavin’s,’” Brown explained.  “The real one was over an hour before.”

“Do tell us about it.  Did you enjoy it?  Won’t you describe your guests?” Mrs. Brainard spoke eagerly.