of her eyes beneath the black eyelashes, and the sensitive red mouth which looked as soft and sweet as a carnation.  It revealed also the absurd shoes of gray suede, with French toes and high and narrow heels, in which she flitted, regardless alike of danger and of common sense, over the slippery ground.  The son of a strong-minded though purely feminine mother, he had been trained to esteem discretion in dress almost as highly as rectitude of character in a woman; and by no charitable stretch of the imagination could he endow his first impression of Patty Vetch with either of these attributes.

“It would serve her right if she fell and broke her leg,” he thought severely; and the idea of such merited punishment was still in his mind when he heard a sharp gasp of surprise, and saw the girl slip, with a frantic clutch at the air, and fall at full length on the shining ground.  When he sprang forward and bent over her, she rose quickly to her knees and held out what he thought at first was some queer small muff of feathers.

“Please hold this pigeon,” she said, “I saw it this afternoon, and I came out to look for it.  Somebody has broken its wings.”

“If you came out to walk on ice,” he replied with a smile, “why, in Heaven’s name, didn’t you wear skates or rubbers?”

She gave a short little laugh which was entirely without merriment.  “I don’t skate, and I never wear rubbers.”

He glanced down at her feet in candid disapproval.  “Then you mustn’t be surprised if you get a sprained ankle.”

“I am not surprised,” she retorted calmly.  “Nothing surprises me.  Only my ankle isn’t sprained.  I am just getting my breath.”

She had rested her knee on a bench, and she looked up at him now with bright, enigmatical eyes.  “You don’t mind waiting a moment, do you?” she asked.  To his secret resentment she appeared to be deliberately appraising either his abilities or his attractions—­he wasn’t sure which engaged her bold and perfectly unembarrassed regard.

“No, I don’t mind in the least,” he replied, “but I’d like to get you home if you have really hurt yourself.  Of course it was your own fault that you fell,” he added truthfully but indiscreetly.

For an instant she seemed to be holding her breath, while he stood there in what he felt to be a foolish attitude, with the pigeon (for all symbolical purposes it might as well have been a dove) clasped to his breast.

“Oh, I know,” she responded presently in a voice which was full of suppressed anger.  “Everything is my fault—­even the fact that I was born!”

Shocked out of his conventional manner, he stared at her in silence, and the pigeon, feeling the strain of his grasp, fluttered softly against his overcoat.  What was there indeed for him to do except stare at a lack of reticence, of good-breeding, which he felt to be deplorable?  His fine young face, with its characteristic note of reserve, hardened into sternness as he remembered having heard somewhere that the girl’s mother had been killed or injured when she was performing some dangerous act at a country fair.  Well, one might expect anything, he supposed, from such an inheritance.