t you think, for your sake
and his, you ought to do this at once?"

"And a little for the sake of--the other man?" she asked, archly.

I dared not inquire, stonily, "What other man?" lest the work I had
accomplished should be destroyed in a single stroke. So I said----

"Yes, and for the sake of the other man."

"You believe it would really matter to him?"

She looked up so anxiously as she put this question that, quite apart
from the interests of Phyllis Rivers, I could not have dashed hers, or
any other woman's hopes, by giving an unchivalrous answer. Let come what
might, I could not deliberately bring the pallor of humiliation to a
female face, especially after words of mine had once caused it to glow
with pleasure.

"How could I believe otherwise?" I demanded; and my tone sounded almost
too sincere in my own ears.

For a moment Freule Menela van der Windt did not answer, and I hoped
that her thoughts had hopped to some other branch of the subject; but
presently she broke out, as if impelled by impulse to utter her thought
to a congenial soul.

"Isn't it strange how sometimes one seems to know a person one has only
just met, better than another, with whom one has been intimate for
years?"

"That is often so," I hurried to assure her, with the idea of
establishing the commonplaceness of such an experience.

"You feel it, too?" Her eyes were fixed on me, and I answered "Yes,"
before I had time to decide whether, at this point, it would not be
safer not to feel it.

"I've often been told that American men are very impulsive. But--are
there many like you?" asked Freule Menela.

"Lots," I said quickly.

"Oh, then it's really true that it is quite a usual thing among your
country people, for a man to tell a girl he cares for her, when he has
seen her only once?"

"I--er--really don't know about that," I answered, beginning to be
disturbed in soul.

"You know only how it is with yourself?" Freule Menela murmured, with a
girlish laugh that betrayed suppressed excitement. "Well, Mr. Starr, I
think it would be foolish to pretend to misunderstand. I have heard much
about you--perhaps you have heard a little of me?--yet you have taken me
by storm. The thing I love best is art. You are a great artist--and you
are a man of the world. You have all the fire of genius--and geniuses
have a right to do things which other men may not do. I believe you have
made me more interested in you, in these last two hours we ha