afresh by the singular concentration of her expression.

"Your mother tells me that you've written a play," she began, a little
shyly; "she says, too, that it is wonderful."

"'She says' is well put," he retorted gaily, "but I hear that you, also,
are among the prophets."

"I am nothing else," she answered earnestly. "It is everything to me--it
is my life."

Her frankness startled him unpleasantly, and but for her girlish
prettiness, he might have felt himself almost repelled. As it was he
merely glanced appealingly at his mother, who intervened with a gesture
of her knitting needle. "She writes stories," explained the old lady,
appearing to transfix her subject on the ivory point; "it is just as I
imagined."

The girl herself met his eyes almost fiercely, reminding him vaguely of
the look with which a lioness might defend her threatened young.

"I've done nothing yet," she declared, "but I mean to--I mean to if it
takes every single hour I have to live." Then her manner changed
suddenly, and she impressed him as melting from her hard reserve. "Oh,
she tells me that you've met Laura Wilde!" she said.

The sacred name struck him, after his impassioned dreaming, like a sharp
blow between the eyes, and he met the girl's animated gesture with a
look of blank aversion.