amusement.

Buller's expression came around slowly to his daughter's beckoning hand, but the Englishman's face seemed to flash at the instant from what he was enjoying to what was expected of him. In the flourish of introductions, across and across, Flora found herself thinking the reality less extraordinary than she had at first supposed. Now that Mr. Kerr was fairly before her, presented to her, and taking her in with the same lively, impersonal interest with which he took in the whole room, "as if," she put it vexedly to herself, "I were a specimen poked at him on the end of a pin," it stirred in her a vague resentment; and involuntarily she held him up to Harry. The comparison showed him a little worn, a little battered, a little too perfunctory in manner; but his genial eyes, deep under threatening brows, made Harry's eyes seem to stare rather coldly; and the fine form of his long, plain face, and the sensitive line of his long thin lips made Harry's beauty look,--well, how did it look? Hardly callous.

This mixed impression the two men gave her was disconcerting. She was all the more ready to be wary of the stranger. She had begun with him in the way she did with everyone--instinctively throwing out a breastwork of conversation from behind which she could observe the enemy. But though he had blinked at it, he had not taken her up, nor helped her out; but had merely stood with his head a little canted forward, as if he watched her through her defenses.

"But San Francisco must seem so limited after London," she had wound up; and the way he had considered it, a little humorously, down his long nose, made her doubt the interest of cities to be reckoned in round numbers. "It's all extraordinary," he said. "You're quite as extraordinary in your way as we in ours."

"Oh," she wondered, still vexed with his inventory, "I had always supposed us awfully commonplace. What is our way, please?"

"Ah," he said, measuring his long step to hers as they sauntered a little, "for one thing, you're so awfully good to a fellow. In London"--and he nodded back, as if London were merely across the room--"they're awfully good to the somebodies. It's the way you take in the nobodies over here that is so astonishing--the stray leaves that blow in with your 'trade,' and can't show any credentials but a letter or two, and their faces; and those"--his diablerie danced out again--"sometimes such deucedly damaged ones."

It was almost indecent, this parade of his nonentity! She wanted to say, "Oh, 

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