It was Sally’s voice: “Well, Brig, I must confess that as an accomplice in crime you are shockingly cool. It was quite unnecessary for you to expect more than the flowers; and yet”--Leacraft seemed to hit the balustrade with his foot. The interruption was perhaps involuntary. In Leacraft’s condition, human nature could not stand a more excruciating strain. Sally looked up. So did the young man. “Oh, Mr. Leacraft, this is fortunate. I want you and Mr. Barry to be excellent friends. Mr. Barry is wonderfully strong, and you are so wise. With his agility, and your advice, I will have two escorts to-morrow that will save me from any exertion of mind or body. Mr. Barry will help me over the hard places, and you will explain things. Pardon,” with a coquettish glance at her companion and a demure courtesy to Leacraft; “you must go through the usual introductions. My cousin, Mr. Barry, Mr. Leacraft. Remember, I rely upon both of you, and you must be as amicable as doves,” and with that equivocal enforcement of neutrality, this impossible beauty vanished. Ned Garrett appeared, and saved the situation, or at least diminished an insufferable embarrassment. The three men were the next instant summoned to dinner. They were met at the door of the dining-room by Mr. Garrett, a tall gentleman, still giving evidence of an athletic youth. Mr. Garrett was a man somewhat tormented with impatience, but genial withal, and possessing a singular power of rapid utterance, conjoined also with the power of business-like demonstration. He shook hands with Leacraft cordially, and addressed a salutation of flattering familiarity to Mr. Barry. Leacraft had suffered a very staggering blow, as he recalled the affair of the stairway, and he fell back, with only a half-satisfied security, upon Sally’s intimation that this unwelcome intruder--the Brig Barry of her previous encomiums--was a cousin. And the plague of it all was that he (Leacraft) was overpoweringly conscious of this same Brig Barry’s indisputable charms. Mr. Brig was a type of physical perfection. He carried on straight, but not too broad, shoulders, a finely shaped head, such which, at their best, are only seen in America; a head which announced to the world its intelligent emotions through the medium of an expressive face, wherein brown eyes, dark, straight eyebrows, a strong, large mouth, an aquiline nose, and blue veined temples, overhung by short, curled hair, combining their mutually enhancing details in making their young owner the target of feminine admiration. Cousins are by no means denied the privileges of marital union, and as there are all kinds of cousins, and the privilege is less and less questionable according to the numerical distance between them, it became a matter of preliminary importance for Leacraft to find out what kind of a cousin Brig Barry was to Sally Garrett.