little out of the ordinary, something he had never been conscious of in
any other girl. Yet he could never seize the impression and examine it.
It was always just escaping; just taking shape to the point of
visibility, and then melting away again; just rising in the
modulations of her voice to a murmur that the ear thought to seize as
a definite chord, and then dying into a hundred other cadences. He
tried to catch it in her eyes, where so much else was to be seen.
Sometimes he perceived its influence, but never itself. It passed as a
shadow in the lower deeps, as though the feather mass of a great sea
growth had lifted slowly on an undercurrent, and then as slowly had
sunk back to its bed, leaving but the haunting impression of something
shapeless that had darkened the hue of the waters. It was most like a
sadness that had passed. Perhaps it was merely an unconscious trick of
thought or manner.

After a time she asked him his first name, and he told her.

"I'd like to know your's too, Miss Lawton," he suggested.

"I wish you wouldn't call me Miss Lawton," she cried with sudden
petulance.

"Why, certainly not, if you don't want me to, but what am I to call
you?"

"Do you know," she confided with a pretty little gesture, "I have
always disliked my real name. It's ugly and horrid. I've often wished
I were a heroine in a book, and then I could have a name I really
liked. Now here's a chance. I'm going to let you get up one for me, but
it must be pretty, and we'll have it all for our very own."