loud to him, and in the midst of
a sentence she put down the book and looked at him queerly.

"Quin," she said, "did you know I am not going back?"

"Why not? Did the play fail?"

"No. It's a big success. Papa Claude will probably make a small fortune
out of it."

"But you? What's the trouble?"

"I've had enough. I had made up my mind to leave the company even before
I was sent for."

Quin's eyes searched her face, but for once he held his tongue.

She was evidently finding it hard to continue. She twisted the fringe of
the counterpane in her slender, white fingers, and she did not look at
him.

"It all turned out as you said it would," she admitted at last. "I--I
simply couldn't stand Harold Phipps."

Quin's heart performed an athletic feat. It leaped into his throat and
remained there.

"But you'll be joining some other company, I suppose?" He tried to make
his voice formal and detached.

"That depends," she said; and she looked at him again in that queer,
tremulous, mysterious way that he did not in the least understand.

Her small hands were fluttering so close to his that he could have
captured them both in one big palm; but he heroically refrained. He kept
saying over and over to himself that it was just Miss Nell's way of being
good to a fellow, and that, whatever happened, he must not make her
unhappy and sorry--he must not lose his head.

"Quin,"--her voice dropped so low he could scarcely hear it,--"have you
ever forgiven me for the way I behaved in New York?"

"Sure!"

He was trembling now, and he wondered how much longer he could hold out.

"Do you--do you--still feel about me the way you--you did--that night on
the bus?" she whispered.

Quin looked at her as a Christian martyr might have looked at his
persecutor.

"I think about you the way I've always thought about you," he said
hopelessly--"the way I shall go on thinking about you as long as I live."

"Well," said Eleanor, with a sigh of relief, "I guess that settles it";
and, to his unspeakable amazement, she laid her head on his pillow and
her cheek on his.

When he recovered from his shock of subliminal ecstasy, his first thought
was of the trouble he was storing up for Eleanor. Even his rapture was
dimmed by the prospect of involving her in another love affair that could
only meet with bitter opposition of her family.

"We must keep it dark for the present," he urged, holding her close as if
he feared she would slip away. "