of this young stranger who had so suddenly swept into my office, it came over me that here was a woman intended to enlighten men who could not understand that shaft which in all ages has without warning pierced men’s hearts and souls—­love at first sight.  Had there not been Katherine Blair, wife and mother—­Katherine Blair Randolph, who filled my love-world as the noonday August sun fills the old-fashioned well with nestling warmth and restful shade—­after this interval, looking back at the past, I dare ask the question—­who knows but that I too might have drifted from the secure anchorage of my slow Yankee blood and floated into the deep waters?

Beauty, the cynic’s scoff, is in the eye of the beholder, or in an angle of vision—­mere product of lime-light, point of view, desire—­but Beulah Sands’s was beauty beyond cavil, superior to all analysis, as definite as the evening star against the twilight sky.  In height medium, girlish, but with a figure maturely modelled, charmingly full and rounded, yet by very perfection of proportion escaping suggestion of “plumpness.”  The head, surrounded and crowned with a wealth of dark golden hair, rested on a neck that would have seemed short had its slender column sprung less graciously from the lovely lines of the breast and shoulders beneath.  It was on the face, however, and finally on the eyes that one’s glances inevitably lingered—­the face rose-tinted, with dimples in either of the full cheeks, entering laughing protest against the sad droop that brought slightly down the corners of a mouth too large perhaps for beauty, if the coral curve of the lips had been less exquisitely perfect.  The straight, thin-nostriled nose, the broad forehead, the square, full jaw almost as low at the points where they come beneath the ears as at the chin, suggested dignity and high resolve coupled with a power of purpose, rare in woman.  The combination of forehead, jaw, and nose was seldom seen.  Had it been possessed by a man it would surely have driven him to the tented field for his profession.  But the greatest glory of Beulah Sands was her eyes—­large, full, very gray, very blue, vivid with all the glamour of her personality, full of smiles and tears and spirituality and passion; one instant, frankly innocent, they illuminated the face of a blonde Madonna; the next, seen through the extraordinary, long, jet-black eye-lashes underneath the finely pencilled black brows, they caressed, coquetted, allured.  I afterward found much of this girl’s purely physical fascination lay in this strange blending of English fairness with Andalusian tints, though the abiding quality of her charm was surely in an exaltation of spirit of which she might make the dullest conscious.  As she stood looking at Bob in my office that long-ago noon, gracefully at ease in a suit of gray, with a gray-feathered turban on her head, and tiny lace bands at neck and wrist, she was very exquisite, exceedingly dainty, and, though Southerner of Southerners, very unlike the typical brunette girl who comes out of Dixie land.