d the rims and his lips actually trembled.

"Poor Enid!" he said. Then he remembered himself, or rather forgot
himself, and became a Number Nine again, and bored Quin talking business
until ten o'clock.

At parting they shook hands cordially, and Mr. Chester urged him to come
again.

"I wonder if you would care to use one of my tickets for the Symphony
Orchestra next week?" he asked.

Quin looked embarrassed. He had accepted a similar invitation the week
before, and had confided to Rose Martel afterward that he "never heard
such a bully band playing such bum music." But Mr. Chester's intention
was so kind that he could run no risk of offending him.

"I'll go if I can," he said, leaving himself a loophole.

"Here is the ticket," said Mr. Chester, "and in case you do not use it,
perhaps you will so good as to pass it on to some one who can."

This suggestion afforded Quin an inspiration.

"Say, Miss Enid," he said the next morning at breakfast. "I want to give
you a ticket to the Symphony Orchestra next Friday night. Will you go?"

"But, my dear boy," she protested greatly touched, "I cannot go by
myself."

"You don't have to. I'm going to take you and come for you. You ain't
going to turn me down, are you?"

"Have you got the ticket?"

"Right here. Now you will go, won't you?"

It would have taken a less susceptible heart than Miss Enid's to resist
Quin's persuasive tones, and in spite of Miss Isobel's disapprobation she
agreed to go.

Just what happened on that opening night of the Fine Arts Series, when
two old lovers found themselves in embarrassing proximity for the first
time in fifteen years, has never been told. But from subsequent events it
is safe to conclude that during the long program they became much more
interested in their own unfinished symphony than in Schubert's, and when
Quin came to take Miss Enid home, he found them in a corner of the lobby,
still so engrossed in conversation that he obligingly walked around the
block to give them an additional five minutes.

CHAPTER 13

Quin's desire for self-improvement soon became an obsession. With Miss
Enid's assistance he got into a night course at the university, and
proceeded to attack his ignorance with something of the fierce
determination he had attacked the Hun the year before in France. He
plunged through bogs of history, got hopelessly entangled in the barbed
wire of mathematics, had hand-to-hand