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 cool as a passing breath upon his own.

"I'm only a masquerader," he said, his courage increasing with his ease, bold enough now to look at her fully, and find her fair.

It seemed to Barrett, in the swift appraisement he made of Alma Nearing, that she was laughing at him with her eyes. Not in derision; more like in the friendly, patronizing, quizzical, knowing fashion of an older and wiser person laughing down at a boy. For laugh eut of her eyes she unquestionably did, with a provoking, engaging little gathering of wrinkles about them, a light and brightness in their soft clearness as if her soul had come to the window with its candle to make merry over the mystification of men.

Her hair was dark red, as if touched with a deep oriental dye, the red of sumach berries after frost. Her forehead was low and calm, her features blending with that entrancing softness from girlhood to maturity which is a woman's greatest charm. Across her nose a little track of freckles ran, as if she had gazed up at a flight of wild geese and their shadow had fastened upon her milk-white skin.

Barrett was not a sentimental young man, rather practical and worldly-bent, in truth; but he knew that this girl must have touched depths of life strange to him, felt its poetry as he never had responded to it, gathered beauties out of it which had escaped him, except for a yearning touch here and there, in his cruise up to this point. To know her well would be to walk among the high places, familiar with the best. So he felt, rather than thought in the sequence of