No man, however safeguarded, could escape the effect of her beauty. For Jack there was but one woman in the world, but even his breast was shaken by a sudden lift of the brown eyes. They had a mysterious, haunting beauty, which even this bigness and softness was not sufficient to explain. Jack, when he had an opportunity to look closer, saw that they were not brown at all, but hazel; that is to say gray, with a rim of brown around the iris. It was the effect of these strangely-colored eyes looking through curved black lashes that moved men to reckless deeds.
Her conversation was not clever. It had no need to be. If she had recited the Thirty-Nine Articles Bobo would have hung on her lips entranced. Jack was too busy trying to explore the mystery of her real self to pay much attention to what she chose to give out.
"Hazel eyes!" he was thinking. "Where have I heard of another girl with hazel eyes? Oh, yes, it was the pretty stenographer who tried to spy on Silas Gyde. She had chestnut hair, too, and a mole inside her right forefinger. I don't suppose these tapering fingers ever jarred the keys."
"What are you thinking of, Mr. Robinson?" Miss Culbreth asked in silvery tones. "I declare you are one of those dreadful men that bore you through and through with their eyes and never say a word."
"I'd rather bore you with my eyes than with my conversation."
"Mercy! Clever, too! I'm frightened to death of you!"
"Didn't I tell you he was clever?" put in poor Bobo, without at all appreciating what was going on.
"The worst of it is," said Miss Culbreth, "that the men who won't talk are those who really have something to say."
This was accompanied by the shadow of a disdainful glance in Bobo's direction, and a warm flash towards Jack, the suggestion being: "One has to humor the stupid rich, but one enjoys oneself with the witty poor!"
Jack was flattered through and through, but at the same time he was thinking: "She's a regular man-eater. I'll have to watch out for poor Bobo."
"You don't approve of me," she said, casting down the lovely eyes.
"Indeed I do," Jack protested. "What you mistake for disapproval is quite another feeling."
Her bold, pleased glance at Jack said: "We can have fun right under his stupid nose, can't we?"