She was walking away but turned her head and looked back at him over her shoulder. The sudden, sparkling smile changed her face like some wizard's magic from that of a sober young woman very much in earnest to a laughing, rather mischievous looking little girl of ten or twelve.
There are a few women who even at middle-age have moments when it seems as though the inexorable hand of Time were forced back to childhood by the youthfulness of their spirit. For a minute, or perhaps a second merely, the observer receives a vivid impression of them as they looked before the anxieties and sorrows which come with living had left their imprint.
Helen Dunbar had this trick of expression to a marked degree and for a fleeting second she always looked like a little girl in shoe-top frocks and pigtails. Mr. Peters had noticed it often, and as a student of physiognomy he had found the transformation so fascinating that he had not only watched for it but sometimes endeavored to provoke it. He also reflected now as he looked after her, that her appearance was a credit to the sheet--a comment he was not always able to make upon the transitory ladies of his staff.
The unconscious object of the newspaper's attention was seated at a desk in the sitting-room of his suite in the Hotel Strathmore, alternately frowning and smiling in the effort of composition.
Mr. Sprudell had a jaunty, colloquial style when he stooped to prose.
"Easy of access, pay dirt from the grass roots, and a cinch to save," he was writing, when a knock upon the door interrupted him.
"Come in!" He scowled at the uniformed intruder.
"A card, sir." It was Miss Dunbar's, of the Evening Dispatch.
"What the dickens!" Mr. Sprudell looked puzzled. "Ah yes, of course!" For a second, an instant merely, Mr. Sprudell had quite forgotten that he was a hero.
"These people will find you out." His tone was bored. "Tell her I'll be down presently."
When the door closed, he walked to the glass.
He twitched at his crimson neck scarf and whisked his pearl-gray spats; he made a pass or two with his military brushes at his cherished part, and took his violets from a glass of water to squeeze them dry on a towel. While he adjusted his boutonnière, he gazed at his smiling image and twisted his neck to look for wrinkles in his coat. "T. Victor Sprudell, Wealthy Sportsman and Hero, Reluctantly Consents to Be Interviewed" was a headline which occurred to him as he went down in the elevator.
The girl from the Dispatch awaited him in the parlor. Mr. Sprudell's genial countenance glowed as he advanced with outstretched hand.