Page:The Wheel of Time, Collaboration, Owen Wingrave (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1893).djvu/206

198 which showed an indefinable passion, he saw a puzzling pathos in his laughing face; one couldn't resist a pang for a young lamb so visibly marked for sacrifice. "Hang him—what a pity he's such a fighter!" he privately sighed, with a want of logic that was only superficial.

This idea, however, would have absorbed him more if so much of his attention had not been given to Kate Julian, who, now that he had her well before him, struck him as a remarkable and even as a possibly fascinating young woman. The fascination resided not in any extraordinary prettiness, for if she was handsome, with her long Eastern eyes, her magnificent hair, and her general unabashed originality, he had seen complexions rosier and features that pleased him more; it resided in a strange impression that she gave of being exactly the sort of person whom, in her position, common considerations, those of prudence and perhaps even a little those of decorum, would have enjoined on her not to be. She was what was vulgarly termed a dependant—penniless, patronized, tolerated; but something in