The Lighted Match

"You have not told me what to wear."

His eyes were as steady as her own. "You will please wear the black gown

with the shimmery things all over it. I can't describe it, but I can

remember it. And a single red rose," he judiciously added.

"'Tis October and the florists are fifty miles away," she demurred. "It

would take a magician's wand to produce the red rose."

"I noticed a funny looking thing among my golf sticks," he remembered.

"It is a little bit like a niblick, but it may be a magic wand in

disguise. You wear the black gown and trust to providence for the red

rose."

She threw back a laugh and was gone.

When she disappeared at the turning, he wheeled and went to the

"bachelors' barracks," as the master of "Idle Times" dubbed the wing

where the unmarried men were quartered.

Two suites next adjoining the room allotted to Benton had been

unoccupied when he had gone out that forenoon. Between his quarters and

these erstwhile vacant ones lay a room forming a sort of buffer space.

Here a sideboard, a card-table, and desk made the "neutral zone," as Van

called it, available for his guests as a territory either separating or

connecting their individual chambers.

Now a blaze of transoms and a sound of voices proclaimed that the

apartments were tenanted. Benton entered his own unlighted room, and

then with his hand at the electric switch halted in embarrassment.

The folding-doors between his apartment and the "neutral territory"

stood wide, and the attitudes and voices of the two men he saw there

indicated their interview to be one in which outsiders should have no

concern. To switch on the light would be to declare himself a witness to

a part at least; to remain would be to become unwilling auditor to more;

to open the door he had just closed behind him would also be to attract

attention to himself. He paused in momentary uncertainty.

One of the men was Pagratide, transformed by anger; seemingly taller,

darker, lither. The second man stood calm, immobile, with his arms

crossed on his breast, bending an impassive glance on the other from

singularly steady eyes. His six feet of well-proportioned stature just

missed an exaggeration of soldierly bearing.

The unwavering mouth-line; level, dark brows almost meeting over

unflinching gray eyes; the uncurved nose and commanding forehead were in

concert with the clean, almost lean sweep of the jaw, in spelling force

for field or council.