Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the city room.djvu/24

 then went quickly forward. The face which turned toward her was not the kind of face she expected to see. Newspaper men had been gushing in their descriptions of the famous prisoner, possibly because their imaginations were stimulated by the fact that many of them had never seen her. Helen Brandow was not really beautiful; Miss Herrick was quick to recognize that as the other woman advanced to meet her. She made a hasty mental note of the healthily pale complexion, the dark, wavy hair, parted in the centre, the heavy eyebrows, the too firmly closed lips, and the regal carriage of head and body. But it was the prisoner's eyes at which she looked longest, and into which she found herself looking again and again during the interview that followed. They were brown,—a tawny brown with yellow lights, but wholly expressionless. They looked into Ruth Herrick's now, coldly, and with no reflection of the half-smile which rested on the prisoner's lips as she motioned toward the chair she had just left, and seated herself on the bed.

"I feel like an intruder, as I always do