r, and in the
reaction of relief she declared: "She's certainly ever so much prettier
than she was..."

"She's rather good fun," he admitted, as though he had not noticed her
other advantages; and suddenly Anna saw in his eyes the look she had
seen there the previous evening.

She felt as if he were leagues and leagues away from her. All her hopes
dissolved, and she was conscious of sitting rigidly, with high head and
straight lips, while the irresistible word fled with a last wing-beat
into the golden mist of her illusions...

She was still quivering with the pain and bewilderment of this adventure
when Fraser Leath appeared. She met him first in Italy, where she was
travelling with her parents; and the following winter he came to
New York. In Italy he had seemed interesting: in New York he became
remarkable. He seldom spoke of his life in Europe, and let drop but the
most incidental allusions to the friends, the tastes, the pursuits which
filled his cosmopolitan days; but in the atmosphere of West Fifty-fifth
Street he seemed the embodiment of a storied past. He presented Miss
Summers with a prettily-bound anthology of the old French poets and,
when she showed a discriminating pleasure in the gift, observed with his
grave smile: "I didn't suppose I should find any one here who would feel
about these things as I do." On another occasion he asked her acceptance
of a half-effaced eighteenth century pastel which he had surprisingly
picked up in a New York auction-room. "I know no one but you who would
really appreciate it," he explained.

He permitted himself no other comments, but these conveyed with
sufficient directness that he thought her worthy of a different setting.
That she should be so regarded by a man living in an atmosphere of art
and beauty, and esteeming them the vital elements of life, made her
feel for the first time that she was understood. Here was some one whose
scale of values was the same as hers, and who thought her opinion
worth hearing on the very matters which they both considered of supreme
importance. The discovery restored her self-confidence, and she revealed
herself to Mr. Leath as she had never known how to reveal herself to
Darrow.

As the courtship progressed, and they grew more confidential, her
suitor surprised and delighted her by little explosions of revolutionary
sentiment. He said: "Shall you mind, I wonder, if I tell you that you
live in a dread-fully conventional atmosphere