She started and turned a face upon him, the surprise of which was partly dispersed by hope of cheer. It was a charming face, if not a pretty one; the skin of a soft, warm pallor, the chin pointed, the mouth small, the middle of the upper lip drooping in a slight point on the lower. Her eyes of a clear, greenish-brown, showed an unusually straight line of under lid. A smile born of relief and the desire to be ingratiating hovered on her lips, and brought into being a dimple in one cheek. In the first moment of encounter the Colonel saw all these details. The profile had struck him into a trance-like fixity of observation. Now at the full face, the smile with which he had accompanied his words died away. He stared at her for a moment speechless and motionless. And then, with a muttered ejaculation, he half turned from her and looked at the dancers. The girl was amazed, for she had never seen him before. Her hopes of a partner were forgotten in her alarmed surprise at the demeanor of the person she thought had come to succor her in a dreary hour. She sat looking at him, wondering what to say and nervously rolling the wad of handkerchief she held from hand to hand. The next moment he had turned back to her, commanding his features into the conventional smile of young acquaintance. “I must beg your pardon,” he said, “for speaking to you without an introduction, but I thought you’d let an old fellow like me come over here and have a few moments’ talk. I don’t dance, you see, and so I was having a pretty lonely time out there on the piazza.” His eyes roamed over her face, their eagerness of inspection curiously at variance with his careless words. Her surprise vanished instantly; she turned herself a little that she might more directly face him. She was evidently delighted to have any companion. Looking at him, she smiled with pleased relief and said in a singularly sweet voice, “Oh, I’m so glad you came! I’ve been sitting here just this way for ever so long. I haven’t danced for three dances. Joe Mosely asked me and then nobody has since. I thought I’d go home, it was so lonesome.” At the sound of her voice, marked not only by a natural sweetness of tone, but by a refinement of pronunciation very rare among the inhabitants of the country districts, the Colonel was again thrown into numbed, staring silence. He felt that he should have liked to rise and walk back and forth for a moment and shake himself, in order to awake from the strange and poignant memories this girl’s face and voice brought up. He was recalled to himself by seeing the smile slowly freezing on her lips, and the confidence of her eyes becoming clouded with alarm. “The child will think I’m mad,” he thought, and said aloud: “You’ve startled me and I guess I’ve done the same to you. But you look very like--extraordinarily like--some one, some one, I once knew.” She was immediately at her ease again. “I look like my mother,” she said. “Every one says that.”