He usually knew exactly why any certain woman pleased him. He had usually demanded beauty; he had worshiped beauty all his life. But beauty must go hand in hand with intellectual qualities; he hated a fool. To-night he found himself puzzled. He couldn't tell exactly why Anne Champneys pleased him. Studying her critically, he decided that she was not beautiful. He could not even call her pretty. Perhaps it was her unusualness. But wherein was she so unusual? He had met women with red hair and white skin and gray-green eyes before--women far, far more seductive than Jason's ward. Yet not one of them all had so potently gripped his imagination. Mrs. Vandervelde was a brilliant pianist, and after dinner Hayden begged her to play. Under cover of the music, he watched Mrs. Champneys. She was sitting almost opposite him, and he could observe her changing countenance. Nancy was beginning to love and understand good music. Men create music; women receive and carry it as they receive and carry life. It is quite as much a part of themselves. Nancy's eyes shadowed. She leaned back in her chair, and the man watched the curve of her white cheek and throat, and the thick braids of her red hair. She had forgotten his presence. He was saying to himself, with something of wonder, "No, she's not beautiful: but, my God! how _real_ she is!" when, subtly drawn by the intensity of his gaze, she turned, looked at him with her clouded eyes, and smiled vaguely. Still smiling, she turned her head again and gave herself up to listening, unconscious that destiny had clapped her upon the shoulder. The man sat quite still. It had come to him with, the suddenness of a lightning stroke, and his first feeling was one of stunned amazement, and an almost incredulous resentment. He had gone to and fro in the earth and walked up and down in it, comfortably immune, an amused and ironic looker-on. And now, at thirty, without rhyme or reason he had fallen in love with a red-haired young woman of whom he knew absolutely nothing, beyond the bare fact that she was Jason Vandervelde's ward. A woman who didn't conform to any standard he had ever set for himself, whose mind was a closed book to him, of whose very existence he had been ignorant until to-night. Old Dame Destiny must have sniggered when she thrust Mrs. Peter Champneys, née Nancy Simms, into the exquisitely ordered life of Mr. Berkeley Hayden!