with her keen eyes always on the road. She read
Browning, Emerson, Swinburne. Once he found her with a book that she
hastily concealed. He insisted on seeing it, and secured it. It was a
book on brain surgery. Confronted with it, she blushed and dropped her
eyes.

His delighted vanity found in it the most insidious of compliments, as
she had intended.

"I feel such an idiot when I am with you," she said. "I wanted to know a
little more about the things you do."

That put their relationship on a new and advanced basis. Thereafter
he occasionally talked surgery instead of sentiment. He found her
responsive, intelligent. His work, a sealed book to his women before,
lay open to her.

Now and then their professional discussions ended in something
different. The two lines of their interest converged.

"Gad!" he said one day. "I look forward to these evenings. I can talk
shop with you without either shocking or nauseating you. You are the
most intelligent woman I know--and one of the prettiest."

He had stopped the machine on the crest of a hill for the ostensible
purpose of admiring the view.

"As long as you talk shop," she said, "I feel that there is nothing
wrong in our being together; but when you say the other thing--"

"Is it wrong to tell a pretty woman you admire her?"

"Under our circumstances, yes."

He twisted himself around in the seat and sat looking at her.

"The loveliest mouth in the world!" he said, and kissed her suddenly.

She had expected it for at least a week, but her surprise was well done.
Well done also was her silence during the homeward ride.

No, she was not angry, she said. It was only that he had set her
thinking. When she got out of the car, she bade him good-night and
good-bye. He only laughed.

"Don't you trust me?" he said, leaning out to her.

She raised her dark eyes.

"It is not that. I do not trust myself."

After that nothing could have kept him away, and she knew it.

"Man demands both danger and play; therefore he selects woman as the
most dangerous of toys." A spice of danger had entered into their
relationship. It had become infinitely piquant.

He motored out to the farm the next day, to be told that Miss Harrison
had gone for a long walk and had not said when she would be back. That
pleased him. Evidently she was frightened. Every man likes to think that
he is a bit of a devil. Dr. Max settled his tie, and, leaving his
car outside the whitewashed fence, dep