The sun was shining in clear, steady brilliancy in a cloudless sky. The snow had quickly melted and it was unusually warm for early December. They turned into the throng of Fifth Avenue and at the corner of Forty-second Street he paused and hesitated and looked at her timidly:
“Say,” he began haltingly, “there's an awful crowd of bums on those seats in the Square behind the building--you know Central Park, don't you?”
“Quite well--I've spent many happy hours in its quiet walks.”
“You know that place the other side of the Mall--that ragged hill covered with rocks and trees and mountain laurel?”
“Would you mind going there where it's quiet--I've such a lot o' things I want to ask you--you won't mind the walk, will you?”
“Certainly not--we'll go there,” Mary responded in even, business-like tones.
“Because, if you don't want to walk I'll call a cab, if you'll let me----”
“Not at all,” was the quick answer. “I love to walk.”
It was impossible for the girl to repress a smile at her ridiculous situation! If any human being had told her yesterday that she, Mary Adams, an old-fashioned girl with old-fashioned ideas of the proprieties of life, would have allowed herself to be picked up by an utter stranger in this unceremonious way, she would have resented the assertion as a personal insult--yet the preposterous and impossible thing had happened and she was growing each moment more and more deeply interested in the study of the remarkable youth by her side.
He was not handsome in the conventional sense. His features were too strong for that. An enemy might have called them coarse. Their first impression was of enormous strength and exhaustless vitality. He walked with a quick, military precision and planted his small feet on the pavement with a soft, sure tread that suggested the strength of a young tiger.
The one feature that puzzled her was the size of his hands and feet. They were remarkably small and remarkable for their slender, graceful lines.
His eyes were another interesting feature. The lids drooped with a careless Oriental languor, as though he would shut out the glare of the full daylight, and yet the pupils flashed with a cold steel-blue fire. One look into his eyes and there could be no doubt that the man behind them was an interesting personality.