seem to have found your way there by
instinct."

"I think it is charming," he remarked. "Only at first it takes your
breath away. But what beautiful editions."

He hesitated, with his hand upon a volume. She laughed at him and took
it down herself. Perhaps she knew that her arm was shapely. At least
she let it remain for a moment stretched out as though to reach the next
volume.

"I always buy _editions de luxe_ when they are to be had," she said. "A
beautiful book deserves a beautiful binding and paper. I believe in the
whole effect. It is not fair to Ruskin to read him in paper covers, and
fancy Le Gallienne in an eighteenpenny series."

"You have Pater!" he exclaimed; "and isn't that a volume of De
Maupassant's?"

His fingers shook with eagerness. She put a tiny volume into his hands.
He shook back the hair from his head and forgot that he had ever been
ill, that he had ever suffered, that he had ever despaired. For the
love of books was in his blood, and his tongue was loosened. For the
first time in his life he knew the full delight of a sympathetic
listener. They entered upon a new relationship in those few minutes.

The summons for dinner found them still there. Douglas, with a faint
flush in his cheeks and brilliant eyes; she, too, imbued with a little
of his literary excitement. She handed him over to a manservant, who
offered him dress clothes, and waited upon him with the calm, dexterous
skill of a well-trained valet. He laughed softly to himself as he
passed down the broad stairs. Surely he had wandered through dreamland
into some corner of the Arabian Nights?--else he had passed from one
extreme of life to the other with a strange, almost magical, celerity.

Dinner surprised him by being so pleasantly homely. A single trim
maidservant waited upon them, a man at the sideboard opened the wine,
carved, and vanished early in the repast. Over a great bowl of
clustering roses he could see her within a few feet of him, plainly
dressed in black lace with a band of velvet around her white neck, her
eyes resting often upon him full of gentle sympathy. They talked of the
books they had been looking at, a conversation all the while without
background or foreground. Only once she lifted her glass, which had
just been filled, and looked across to him.

"To the city--beautiful," she said softly. "May the day soon come when
you shall write of it--and forget!"

He drank the toast fervently. But of the future then