some fictitious explanation. Her tranquillity and self-control were remarkable, otherwise; she seemed very young to possess those qualities in such eminent degree.

She was looking wearily past him, her gaze probing some unguessed abyss of thought. Kirkwood felt himself privileged to stare in wonder. Her naïve aloofness of poise gripped his imagination powerfully,—the more so, perhaps, since it seemed eloquent of her intention to remain enigmatic,—but by no means more powerfully than the unaided appeal of her loveliness.

Presently the girl herself relieved the tension of the situation, fairly startling the young man by going straight to the heart of things. Without preface or warning, lifting her gaze to his, "My name is really Dorothy Calendar," she observed. And then, noting his astonishment, "You would be privileged to doubt, under the circumstances," she added.     "Please let us be frank."

"Well," he stammered, "if I didn't doubt, let's say I was unprejudiced."

His awkward, well-meant pleasantry, perhaps not conceived in the best of taste, sounded in his own ears wretchedly flat and vapid. He regretted it spontaneously; the girl ignored it.

"You are very kind," she iterated the first words he had heard from her lips. "I wish you to understand that I, for one, appreciate it."

"Not kind; I have done nothing. I am glad.... One is apt to become interested when Romance is injected into a prosaic existence." Kirkwood allowed himself a keen but cheerful glance.

She nodded, with a shadowy smile. He continued, purposefully, to distract her, holding her with his honest, friendly eyes.

"Since it is to be confidences" (this she questioned with an all but imperceptible lifting of the eyebrows), "I don't mind telling you my own name is really Philip Kirkwood."

"And you are an old friend of my father's?"

He opened his lips, but only to close them without speaking. The girl moved her shoulders with a shiver of disdain.

"I knew it wasn't so."

"You know it would be hard for a young man like myself to be a very old friend," he countered lamely.

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