Page:Dangerous Business (1927).pdf/191

 here he was himself, not a memory of him; he had found her on the street and stepped up to her.

"Take your pick," he was saying easily. "Pick any one anywhere. Look in all the windows!" he bid her and squeezed her arm and was gone. Jay was not with him, for she watched after him, to make sure of it; nor did she see Jay elsewhere on the walk. She went away from the window in the opposite direction from Lew Alban and circled the block before turning home.

Jay had not seen her, which was as well for him as for her, because he had been making of her, without being aware of it, a sort of reliance in his world of ever shifting, shaken values. He knew no other girl quite like her; and only now and then, amid the thousands and thousands of people one looked upon and passed, did he see any one with her quiet quality of—what was it? Poise? More than that but he had no word for it. He remembered, once, meeting her unexpectedly and suddenly. He had been going along and amid the hurrying, hunting, wondering, frightened faces approaching him, he had been caught by eyes which looked at him with none of the common panic. None of it! There she was.

Her father had such a quality, which lived in the eyes, Jay remembered; seamen's eyes, he had thought them, calm with the consideration of the four horizons, the water and sky and sun and stars. He liked Adrian Powell's eyes and he liked Ellen's looking on the world without any fear. So it was well he had not happened upon her to-night, for he would not have seen her without fear.

He had been awaiting Lew at the club and Lew re-