A most amazing thing happened to Mr. Thompson.  His heart leaped.

Perhaps it rarely happens that a normal, healthy man reaches a comparative degree of maturity without experiencing a quickening of his blood in the presence of a woman.  Yet it cannot be gainsaid that it does happen.  It was so in Thompson’s case.  Staring into the clear pools of Sophie Carr’s gray eyes some strange quality of attraction in a woman first dawned on him.  Something that made him feel a passionate sense of incompleteness.

He did not think this.  The singular longing had flamed up like a beacon within him.  It had nothing to do with his mental processes.  It was purely an instinctive revelation.  A blind man whose sight has been restored, upon whose eager vision bursts suddenly all the bright beauty of sun and sky and colorful landscape, could have been no more bewildered than he.  It was as if indeed he had been blind.

All the women he had ever known seemed pale and colorless beside this girl standing near, her head a little aside as she looked at him.  There was not a detail of her that escaped him, that failed to make its appeal, from the perfect oval of her face down to the small feet in bead-ornamented moccasins.  A woman’s eyes, her hair, her hands, her bearing—­these things had never obtruded upon his notice before.  Yet he saw now that a shaft of sunlight on her hair made it shimmer like ripe wheat straw, that her breast was full and rounded, her lips red and sweetly curved.  But it was not alone that swift revelation of seductive beauty, or warm human desirableness, that stirred him so deeply, that afflicted him with those queer uncomfortable sensations.  He found himself struggling with a sense of guilt, of shame.  The world, the flesh, and the devil seemed leagued against his peace of mind.

He was filled with an incredulous wonder as to what manner of thing this was which had blown through the inner recesses of his being like a gusty wind through an open door.  He had grown to manhood with nothing but a cold, passionless tolerance in his attitude toward women.  Technically he was aware of sex, advised as to its pitfalls and temptations; actually he could grasp nothing of the sort.  A very small child is incapable of associating pain with a hot iron until the hot iron has burned him.  Even then he can scarcely correlate cause and effect.  Neither could Thompson.  No woman had ever before stirred his pulse to an added beat.

But this—­this subtle, mysterious emanation from a smiling girl at his elbow singed him like a flame.  If he had been asleep he was now in a moment breathlessly, confusedly awake.

The commotion was all inward, mental.  Outwardly he kept his composure, and the only sign of that turmoil was a tinge of color that rose in his face.  And as if there was some mysterious mode of communication established between them a faint blush deepened the delicate tint of Sophie Carr’s cheeks.  Thompson rose.  So did Tommy Ashe with some haste when he perceived her there.