I don’t think I like your being here,” Frances remarked to the young man after a brief frowning inspection. She spoke slowly, and with a deliberate gravity and evenness of tone.

Christian’s wide-open eyes continued to gaze up at her with that disconcerting look which had in it both remote abstraction and something very intimately personal. His glance expressed a tender pleasure as it maintained itself against hers.

“Oh, but I like it so very much!” he murmured, with a pleading smile.

Then, by a sudden movement, he sat up, flushing in a novel embarrassment. “I beg you to pardon me,” he urged, faltering over his words. “I was not wholly awake, I think; or I was trying to persuade myself that it was still a dream. Do not think me so rude, I pray you!”

She signified by a gesture and momentary facial relaxation that this particular detail of the situation need not detain them.

“But”—she began, in her stiffest and least amiable voice, and then hesitated. She put her knee again upon the chair, and, resting her hand on its back, looked dubiously at him. “I hardly know what to say,” she started once more, and stopped altogether.

“Oh, but it is I who must say everything,” he broke in, eagerly. “I am quite awake now—I see, of course, it is all absurd, meaningless in your eyes, till I explain it to you.” He rose to his feet and put forth his hand as if to offer it in greeting. No responsive token being visible on her set face, or in her rigid posture, as she confronted him, he waved both hands in a deprecatory movement over the table laden with flowers between them. “These are my peace-offering,” he said, with less confidence. “I hoped they would say some things for me—some things which I feel within me, and cannot easily put into speech. That is what I expected they would surely do. But”—he finished with dejection, after another glance into her face—“evidently they are as tongue-tied as I am. I see it was not a happy thought in me to bring them—or to come myself!”

She had followed his words with rapt attentiveness—but at the end seemed to remember only one of them. “The ‘thought,’” she said, coldly. “Yes, that is what I do not understand. What was the thought?”

He regarded her with some perplexity. “What was the thought—my thought?” he repeated. “Oh—since it does not explain itself, what good is there in talking about it? Let us say that there was no ‘thought’ at all. I will make my compliments and apologies—and say good-morning—and nothing at all will have happened.”

“No,” she answered reflectively. “That would be stupid. You have been to expense, and evidently to some inconvenience as well, to do this thing. On second thoughts,” she went on, with an apparent effort to modify the asperities of her tone and manner, “I dare say that I haven’t behaved quite nicely to you. If you remember, I told you a long time ago that bad manners was a failing of mine.”

“I remember every little word that you spoke,” said Christian softly.

Frances hardened her voice on the instant. “But that doesn’t help me to understand why—what this is all about.”

He responded slowly, searching for his words as he went along. The rattle of machines in the next room for the first time came into the conversation, and forced him to lift his voice. “You were my last friend in France—my first friend in England,” he began. “I said I would not forget you, and you have been always in my mind—always somewhere secure and fresh and sweet in my mind. It was only last night that I learned where I might find you. You will remember that when I begged you to tell me, you laughed and would not. I must not make you believe that I did not very soon find out your name or that I could not have learned your whereabouts much earlier. All I say is that I did not forget—and that last night, when the chance came naturally to me, I asked and learned what I desired to know. And then—why, then—this knowledge spread upward to be of more importance than all the other things I knew. I went home—but never to think of sleeping, but only to change my clothes and hasten out again, to get some new morning flowers for you, and to come to you at the earliest moment. I did not know that London rose so late—I arrived before the time, and, so it seems, waiting for your coming, I fell asleep. That is the entire story. You see it is not very complicated—it is by no means extraordinary.”

Frances had listened with a dreamy gentleness in her gray eyes. She started slightly when he stopped, and gave him a keen, cool glance. “The entire story?” she queried. “I think you have forgotten to mention that it was my sister who told you about me, and gave you my address.”

Her prescience in no wise astonished Christian. Imagination had thrown round the Minerva-like figure which personified her in his thoughts, such a glamour of intellectual radiancy, that it seemed quite a natural thing for her to divine the obscure, and comprehend the mysterious. He smiled at her as he shrugged his shoulders. “It did not occur to me as important,” he exclaimed. “It is true, however, that she told me. She did not know the address when I asked her, but later she procured it for me from her brother. It was at a supper at the Hanover Theater. Afterward there was dancing on the stage. I fear it would have been rather tiresome for me if I had not met your sister. She is a very friendly lady, and she talked a great deal to me.”

“About me?” demanded Frances, sharply.

“Oh, no—about you only a few pleasant words; not more. It seems you do not meet very often.”

He spoke with such evident frankness that she hesitated over the further inquiry her mind had framed. At last she put it in altered form. “Then you would not say that she sent you here—-that she told you to come—and to come by way of Covent Garden, and buy these flowers?” The question, as she uttered it, was full of significant suggestion about the nature of the reply desired. Its tone, too, carried the welcome hint of a softened mood, under the influence of which Christian’s face brightened with joy.

“Why, not at all!” he cried, lifting his voice gaily above the typewriters’ clatter. “She did speak of Covent Garden, and the show of flowers there in the early morning, but it was not in the least with reference to you. It was my own idea long after she had gone. Oh, no one would be more surprised than that good sister of yours to know that I am here!”

Frances, with a puzzling smile which ended in a long breath of relief, took up some of the roses and held them to her face.

“Sit down again,” she bade him, with a pleasant glow in the eyes regarding him over the blossoms; “sit down, and let us talk. Or does that noise bore you?”

“Oh, I am too glad!” he assured her, beamingly. “If it were cannon firing in the next room, it would be nothing to me.” Then, as he continued to gaze with delight at her, an inspiration came to him. “Or is it possible for you to come out? Would you walk a little while, perhaps on the Embankment?”

“I am not particularly busy this morning,” she made indirect answer. Then a digression occurred to her. “But I am rather surprised,” she observed, “to find that England hasn’t made more changes in your speech. I would have expected a perfect Piccadilly accent, but you talk exactly as you did on the train and the boat.”

He laughed and clapped his hands for glee. “It is wholly because I am with you again,” he declared. “Everybody has said for months that the foreign traces had quite vanished from my tongue—but the first glimpse of you—ah! they come instantly back! It is the association of ideas, beyond doubt—that very sweet association,” he added, with trembling softness, “of oh! such fond ideas.”

She had taken up her hat. “We will go out for a little, if you like,” she remarked rather abruptly.

“And I am altogether forgiven?” he demanded in high spirits, as he rose. “You consent to accept the flowers?”

“Heaven only knows what I shall do with them,” she answered, with a grimace of mock despair. “But it was ever so nice of you to get them, and I thank you very much. Oh, I must tell Connie to sprinkle them before I go.”

She moved to the inner door, and as she opened it turned. “Wouldn’t you like to come and see the factory at work?” she inquired, and he joined her with alacrity. “It isn’t much to see at the moment,” she explained, as they entered the large room. “We have nine machines, but only four of them are needed just now. Until after the Jubilee, I’m afraid things will be very dull with publishers and playwrights. However, one must take the lean with the fat.”

Christian looked somewhat nervously about him, while his friend stepped aside to confer with the girl whom he remembered from the early morning. Both this young lady and the three at their machines made a rapid, and as it seemed to him, perfunctory survey of their mistress’s guest, and bent their attention upon their duties again as if his presence signified nothing whatever to them. He suspected that in reality they were plunged in furious speculation concerning him; and this embarrassed him so much that he turned and strolled back toward the open door and even entered the office before Frances rejoined him.

When she came back to him, she took from the table a couple of pale, half-opened tea-rose buds, gave one to him to fix in his lapel and pinned the other to the breast of her fawn-gray frock. “If you are ready,” she said, smilingly, and led the way to the staircase. As she descended before him, he noted the intelligent simplicity of this dress she wore—how it fitted her as gracefully and as artistically as Poole ever fitted Dicky Westland. About her hat, the carriage of her head and shoulders, the free decision of her step, there was something individual which appealed directly to him—a charm which would not be duplicated by any other person in the world. He looked at his watch as he went down, and found with surprise that it was nearly eleven.

He stepped to her side at the street doorway, with a meaning gesture. “Do you remember,” he said, gently—“on the boat you took my arm?”

“I think London is a little different,” she answered, decisively enough, yet with the effect to his ears of unreserved camaraderie.

They walked slowly down to the end of the street. “Do you mind which way we go?” she asked him, and turned eastward. “I haven’t seen the city in an age,” she remarked, as if the choice needed explanation. Sauntering along, they found little to say to each other at the outset. What words they exchanged were about the mild, sunless sky of the London April, and the wonderful pencilings and rubbings of soot upon the silver-gray of London’s stone walls. Learning that he was a stranger to the Temple, she led the way through the gate and lane, and then, by turnings which it surprised him to find her knowing so well, to the curious little church. The door in the sunken porch was ajar, and they went in. She pointed to the circle of freestone Crusaders looking complacently up from the floor at the Oriental dome which had caught their traveled fancy ages before, and it occurred to her to say: “Is it not interesting to you to think that there were Torrs who were friends and companions of these very Magnavilles and Mareschalls, six hundred years ago?”

He thrust out his lips a little. “I have not much interest in anything concerning the Torrs,” he answered.

She looked up at him with curiosity, but offered no comment. They left the church, and she led him round to the spot where, amid the cracked old flags from forgotten graves, Oliver Goldsmith’s tomb now finds itself. A crumbling wreath of natural flowers showed that some kindly soul had remembered the date of the poet’s death, three weeks before.

Christian displayed scarcely more interest here. “I have not read his ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’” he confessed to her. “I had always the intention to do so, but it—it never came off.”

“That brings me to one thing I wanted to ask you,” she said, as they retraced their steps. “What books have you been reading—since you came to England? I am anxious to know?”

“Not many,” he admitted with an attempted laugh which ended rather shamefacedly. “Reading did not fit itself very readily into my time. At Lord Chobham’s I read in some old books, and at Emanuel’s too, but it was all about our own people—the Barons’ War, and the Wars of the Roses, and the Civil War. I know something about these and about the old families of the West, but not much else. I should have read more, I know, but there was really not much opportunity. But you—I saw at your office what serious books you read. It is what I should like to do, too—sometimes. But there has been no one to talk with about any kind of books.”

They had come out again to the Embankment, and made their pace now even more deliberate. “I have been thinking a great deal about you, and your future, since we met,” she remarked, after a pause. “It has made me wonder what you would do, when the opportunity came to you—and what it would be open for you to do. That is why I began reading the books that I take it you have in mind—but afterward I read them for their own value. At the beginning”—she went on slowly, studying the sky-line in an abstracted way as she walked—“at the beginning I thought I should see you again sometime, and I had the idea that I wanted to be able to advise—or no, not that, but to talk to you, and try to interest you in the right sort of things. But it did not take me long to see how foolish that was.”

“No, no!” urged Christian; without, however, any convincing display of enthusiasm. “There is no one in the world from whom I will so gladly take advice as you.”

She smiled fleetingly at him. “And there is no one in the world,” she replied, “more firmly resolved not to offer you any.”

“Ah, but if I beg it! You may not offer—but will you refuse to give?”

“What is the good?” she broke forth in a louder tone, speaking as if in annoyed reproof to herself. “No person can think or feel or decide for another! It is nonsense to pretend otherwise. A man must think his own thoughts, follow his own nature! We can ask nothing finer of a man than to honestly be himself. I get so angry at all these ceaseless attempts to run people all into one............