The Tracer of Lost Persons
features in the portrait he had constructed of an ideal. And she had caught him in absent-minded contemplation of the hands he had been describing. He knew that his face was the face of a guilty man.

"What is the next question?" he stammered, eager to answer it in a manner calculated to allay her suspicions.

"The next question?" She glanced at the list, then with a voice of velvet which belied the eyes, clear as frosty brown pools in November: "The next question requires a description of her feet."

"Feet! Oh---they--they're rather large--why, her feet are enormous, I believe--"

She looked at him as though stunned; suddenly a flood of pink spread, wave on wave, from the white nape of her neck to her hair; she bent low over her pad and wrote something, remaining in that attitude until her face cooled.

"Somehow or other I've done it again!" he thought, horrified. "The best thing I can do is to end it and go home."

In his distress he began to hedge, saying: "Of course, she is rather tall and her feet are in some sort of proportion--in fact, they are perfectly symmetrical feet--"

Never in his life had he encountered a pair of such angrily beautiful eyes. Speech stopped with a dry gulp.

"We now come to 'General Remarks,'" she said in a voice made absolutely steady and emotionless. "Have you any remarks of that description to offer, Mr. Gatewood?"

"I'm willing to make remarks," he said, "if I only knew what you wished me to say."

She mused, eyes on the sunny window, then looked up. "Where did you last see her?"

"Near Fifth Avenue."

"And what street?"

He named the street.

"Near _here_?"

"Rather," he said timidly.

She ruffled the edges of her pad, wrote something and erased it, bit her scarlet upper lip, and frowned.


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