"I beg your pardon," he said, seating himself. "May I give you my card?"

He felt as if there was something brutally indecent in what he was doing
and the knowledge of it sent a red flush to his cheeks. The girl read
his name, smiled across the table at him, and with a pretty gesture,
motioned him to bring his cup and share her tea with her. He returned to
his table and when he came back with the cup in his hand she was writing
on one of the pages of the tablet, which she passed across to him.

"You must pardon me for not talking," he read. "I can hear you very
well, but I, unfortunately, am a mute."

He could not repress the low ejaculation of astonishment that came to
his lips, and as his companion lifted her cup he saw in her face again
the look that had stirred him so strangely when he stood in the window
of the Hotel Windsor. Howland was not a man educated in the trivialities
of chance flirtations. He lacked finesse, and now he spoke boldly and to
the point, the honest candor of his gray eyes shining full on the girl.

"I saw you from the hotel window to-night," he began, "and something in
your face led me to believe that you were in trouble. That is why I have
ventured to be so bold. I am the engineer in charge of the new Hudson
Bay Railroad, just on my way to Le Pas from Chicago. I'm a stranger in
town. I've never been in this--this place before. It's a very nice
tea-room, an admirable blind for the opium stalls behind those walls."

In a few terse words he had covered the situation, as he would have
covered a similar situation in a business deal. He had told the girl
who and what he was, had revealed the cause of his interest in her, and
at the same time had given her to understand that he was aware of the