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Williams, half stooping, looked at her with an intentness like great hunger; but before he spoke she had backed away, afraid of his eyes. Nada the impetuous, the elder by two years, swept at him with arms out-reaching and closed on his neck.

Straightening, he raised her, held her, looked at her, pressed his face to her cheek, and put her down without a word.

Abashed by her sudden daring, she darted back to Brundage and hid her face against his breast.

Williams did not speak, but turned and went from the room.

Now, something over ten years later, Nada had come to him in a San Francisco lodging-house.

Nada, eagerly half-smiling, waited expectantly for him to speak. The veil had been bunched in cobwebby layers on the red velvet hood, exposing her face, rich with dark colouring. The black strings of the hood were tied in a bow at one side of her chin.

Williams looked at her with piercing intensity, as if he was trying to get through the years that overlay this woman and see again the child of ten years before. Now he saw a girl of small, shapely body, dark eyed, with full, soft, flexible lips, and every curve and line of her little amber-tinted face hinted at a merry impulsiveness; but he looked at her so long, so penetratingly, that she began to feel a little uncertain, and her pretty face clouded.