Page:O'Higgins--The Adventures of Detective Barney.djvu/284

 and his young imagination—that had been reined in restively while he watched—was set galloping with the forward motion—so that when he opened his paper, to study out the Baxter case, he could no more control his attention than if he were in school with a text book, on a Spring day, beside an open window that overlooked a baseball game.

He frowned diligently at a portrait of Elizabeth Baxter smiling, on the front page,—a dark girl of twenty, naïvely handsome and self-assured. He gathered from her picture nothing more than a feeling that her smile was incongruous. He did not understand that the photograph had been originally published with the announcement of her engagement to marry a conspicuously wealthy old bachelor named Huntley—an occasion for which a smile was fitting. He stared at the Panama hat. He looked out of the window absent-mindedly. He smiled to himself. He came back to his newspaper with a guilty start.

This is what he should have been reading: