ll live to go far beyond this, and I'm glad to see that
her work is winning slowly. Every now and then one runs across a rare
admirer."

"And she is as kind as she is gifted," remarked Trent fervently. Then he
made his way through the assistant editors in the outer office, and
hastened with his prodigious news to Gramercy Park.

Laura was alone, and after sending up his name he followed the servant
to her study on the floor above, where he found her working with a
pencil, as she sat before a brightly burning wood fire, over a
manuscript which he saw to his surprise was not in verse. At his glance
of enquiry she smiled and laid the typewritten pages carelessly aside.

"No, it's not mine," she said. "They're several short stories which Mr.
Kemper did many years ago, and he's asked me to look over them. I find,
by the way, that they need a great deal of recasting."

"Is it possible," he exclaimed in amazement, "that you allow people to
bore you with stuff like that?"

The smile which flickered almost imperceptibly across her lips mystified
him completely, and he drew his chair a little nearer that he might
bring himself directly beneath her eyes.

"Oh, well, I don't mind it once in a while," she returned, "though he
hasn't in the very least the literary sense."

"But I wasn't aware that you even knew him," he persisted, puzzled.

"It doesn't take long to know some people," she retorted gayly; then as
her eyes rested upon his face, she spoke with one of her sympathetic
flashes of insight: "You've come to bring me good news about the play,"
she said. "Benson has accepted it--am I not right?"

"I'm jolly glad to say you are!" he assented with enthusiasm. "It will
be put on in the autumn and Benson has suggested Katie Hanska for the
leading role."

His voice died out in a joyous tremor, and he sat looking at her with
all the sparkles in his young blue eyes.

"I am glad," said Laura, and she stretched out her hand, which closed
warmly upon his. "I can't tell you--it's useless to try--how overjoyed I
am."

"I knew you'd be," he answered softly, while his grateful glance
caressed her. The triumph of the day--which seemed to him prophetic of
the triumph of the future--went suddenly to his head, and in some
strange presentiment he felt that his emotion for Laura was bound up and
made a part of his success in literature. He could not, try as he
would--disassociate her from her books, nor her books from his, and as
he