why you ran. You were afraid!" said Paul.

Her eyes flashed and there was a fine scorn in her tones.

"Afraid--of what, pray?"

"Of being caught--too easily! Come, now--weren't you?"

"I wouldn't contradict you for the world, Paul."

She lingered over his name with a cadence in her tone that made it
almost a caress. It thrilled him again as it had from the beginning.

"But I'll forgive you for running away from me, since I am so fortunate
as to be with you now where you can't possibly run very far! Strange,
isn't it, how Fate has thrown us together?"

"Very!"

There was a dry sarcasm in the tones, and a mockery in the glance, that
told him she was not blind to his manoeuvres. Their eyes met and they
laughed again. Truly, life just then was exceedingly pleasant for the
two on the deck of the Lusitania.

"But I was looking for you before that, Opal--long before that--weeks!"

The girl was truly surprised now and turned to him wonderingly. Then,
without question, he told her of his overhearing her at the garden
party--what a long time ago it seemed!--and his desire, ever since, to
meet her.

He told her, too, of his hearing her laugh at the theatre that night;
but the girl was silent, and said not a word of having seen him there.
Confidences were all right for a man, she thought, but a girl did well
to keep some things to herself.

He did not say that he was deliberately following her to America, but
the girl had her own ideas upon the subject and smiled to herself at the
lively development of affairs since that tiresome garden party she had
found so unbearable. Here was an adventure after her own heart.

And yet Opal Ledoux had much on her mind just then. The Boy had read the
signs upon her face correctly. She was troubled.

For a long time they sat together, and looking far out over the vast
expanse of dancing blueness, they spoke of life--and the living of it.
And both knew so little of either!

It was a strange talk for the first one--so subtly intimate, with its
flashes of personality and freedom from conventions, that it seemed like
a meeting of old friends, rather than of strangers. Some intimacies are
like the oak, long and steady of growth; others spring to full maturity
in an hour's time. And these two had bridged the space of years in a few
moments of converse. They understood each other so well.

This same idea occurred to them simultaneously, as she looked up at him
with eyes glowing with a