sions."

"Why should our illusions, if we were so fortunate as to have them,
inevitably be lost?" he asked, provoked into an assurance of his
interest by the serene disinclination she displayed.

"Because they invariably are if they are illusions?" she responded,
"and you and I could never be absolute realities to each other, since to
reach the reality in a person one must not only apprehend but comprehend
as well. I doubt if there can be any permanent friendship between people
who are totally unlike."

Half angrily he swung the stick he carried at his side. "Then what
becomes of the attraction of opposites?" he insisted.

"A catastrophe usually," she returned.

Her composed indifference irritated him more than he was willing to
admit even to himself. Never in his recollection had he encountered a
woman who showed so marked a disinclination for his society; and the
wonder of her avoidance challenged him into the exercise of the personal
magnetism he had always found so invincible in its attraction. Had she
met his advances with unaffected feminine eagerness, he would have
parted, probably, from her at the next corner, but her polite
indifference kept him, though indignant, still at her side. Of adulation
he was weary, but a positive aversion promised a new and exhilarating
experience of life.

"But why are you so sure that we are opposites?" he enquired presently.

"How am I sure that you prefer fair women--and adore an ample beauty?"
she retorted lightly. "My intuitions again!"

"Your intuitions are so numerous that they must be sometimes wrong," he
remarked.

"Oh, my intuitions are helped out by Gerty's observation," she laughed
in response.

"Ah, I see," he said: and it seemed to him that he understood now her
open avoidance, her barely concealed dislike, and the distant reticence
which made her appear to him as remote as a star. Gerty had whispered of
his affairs--perhaps of Madame Alta, and in Laura's unworldly vision his
delinquencies had showed strangely distorted and out of drawing. His
anger blazed up within him, yet he knew that the attraction of the woman
beside him was increased rather than diminished by his resentment.

"So my pretty cousin has given me a bad character," he observed, and his
annoyance roughened his usually genial voice.

"On the other hand she admires you very much," Laura hastened to assure
him; "she sings your praises with unflagging energy."

"Then, this, I suppose, you h