I do not know how to describe a woman.  This one, whom I have known better than any other woman in the world, is most difficult of all for me to picture.  She stood there, not uninterested altogether, for, no doubt, Harlson had been telling her already of his closest friend, his lieutenant in many things, and I had an opportunity to study her with all closeness as we exchanged the commonplaces.  I understood, when I saw her, how it was that he had referred to her so absurdly as a little brown streak of a thing.  Little she was, assuredly, and brown, and so slender, that his simile was not bad, but the brownness and the slenderness were by no means all there was noticeable of her.  She was not imposing, this woman, but she was not commonplace.  Supple of figure she was, and there were the big eyes this stricken friend of mine had told me of, and rather pronounced eyebrows, and her lips were full and red, and there was that fullness of the chin, or, rather, the vague dream or hint or vision of a daintily double chin at fifty, which means so much, but the forehead was what a woman’s should be, and the glance of the eyes was clean and pure, though, in a clever woman’s way, observant and comprehensive.  It was a cultivated and fascinating woman whom I met.

We talked together, and Grant Harlson looked on gratified, and she seemed to like me.  She made me feel, in her own way, that she liked me because she knew of me, and as we were talking I felt that she was paying, unconsciously, the greatest compliment she could to the man beside us.  I knew it was because of the other, and of something that he had said of me, that she was so readily on terms of comradeship.  And I knew, in the same connection, and from the same reasoning, that she had already begun to care as much for him as he for her—­the man who, the night before, had so comported himself with me.  Of course, it appears absurd that I could reach such a conclusion upon so little basis, but to tell when people are interested in each other is not difficult sometimes, even for so dull a man as I.

“You have known Mr. Harlson many years, I believe,” she said, and added smilingly:  “What kind of a man is he?”

“A very bad man,” I replied, gravely.

She turned to him in a charming, judicial way: 

“If your friends so describe you, Mr. Harlson, what must your enemies say?  And what have you to say in your own defense?  What you yourself have owned to me in the past is recognition of the soundness of the authority.”

“I haven’t a word to say.  Of course, I had not expected this unfriendly villain to be what he has proved himself, but what he says is, no doubt, true.  I’m going to reform, though.  In fact, I’ve already begun.”

“When was the revolution inaugurated?”

He looked at her so earnestly that there came a faint flush to her cheek.  “Since my eyes were opened, and I saw the light,” he answered.