"Eyes?" Her own dared him to continue what, coincidence or not, was plainly a description of herself.

"B-b-b--" He grew suddenly timorous, hesitating, pretending to a perplexity which was really a healthy scare. For she was frowning.

"Curious I can't think of the color of her eyes," he said; "is--isn't it?"

She coldly inspected her pad and made a correction; but all she did was to rub out a comma and put another in its place. Meanwhile, Gatewood, chin in his hand, sat buried in profound thought. "_Were_ they blue?" he murmured to himself aloud, "or _were_ they brown? Blue begins with a _b_ and brown begins with a _b_. I'm convinced that her eyes began with a _b_. They were not, therefore, gray or green, because," he added in a burst of confidence, "it is utterly impossible to spell gray or green with a _b_!"

Miss Southerland looked slightly astonished.

"All you can recollect, then, is that the color of her eyes began with the letter _b_?""That is absolutely all I can remember; but I _think_ they _were_--brown."

"If they _were_ brown they must be brown now," she observed, looking out of the window.

"That's true! Isn't it curious I never thought of that? What are you writing?"


"Brown," she said, so briefly that it sounded something like a snub.

"Mouth?" inquired the girl, turning a new leaf on her pad.

"Perfect. Write it: there is no other term fit to describe its color, shape, its sensitive beauty, its--_What_ did you write just then?"

"I wrote, 'Mouth, ordinary.'"

"I don't want you to! I want--"

"Really, Mr. Gatewood, a rhapsody on a girl's mouth is proper in poetry, but scarcely germane to the record of a purely business transaction. Please answer the next question tersely, if you don't mind: 'Figure?'"

"Oh, I _do_ mind! I can't! Any poem is much too brief to describe her figure--"

"Shall we say 'Perfect'?" asked the girl, raising her brown eyes in a glimmering transition from vexation 

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