ven while he resented her sincerity of manner. "Appeal! and to whom?"
she enquired.

"To you--to your mercy," he laughed.

She glanced at Gerty with a look which hardly simulated a curiosity she
apparently did not feel.

"But why should you need my mercy?" she demanded, as she sat down on a
little sofa heaped with cushions.

His gaze, after resting a moment on the smooth black hair beneath her
velvet hat, turned to the exquisite shining waves which encircled
Gerty's head.

"Ask my cousin," he advised with merriment.

Whatever Gerty's reason for not caring to bring them together may have
been, she concealed it now beneath a ready acceptance of the situation.

"Oh, he tried to make me promise to take him to see you," she explained,
"but I've told him you'd show him no quarter because he hasn't read your
poems."

Laura raised her eyes to his face, and he had again the sensation of
looking into an unutterable personality.

"I'm glad you haven't read them," she rejoined, "for now you won't be
able to talk to me about them."

"So you don't like to have one talk about them?"

She met his question with direct simplicity. "About my verse? I
shouldn't like to have you do it."

"And why not I?" he demanded, laughing.

"Oh, I don't know," she returned, her eyes lighting with the humour of
her frankness, "can one explain? But I'm perfectly sure that it's not
the kind of thing you'd like. There's no action in it."

"So Gerty has told you that I'm a strenuous creature?"

"Perhaps. I don't remember." She turned to Gerty, looking down upon her
with a tenderness that suffused her face with colour. "What was it that
you told me, dearest?"

"What did I tell you?" repeated Gerty, still clasping Laura's hand. "Oh,
it must have been that he agrees with some dreadful person who said that
poetry was the insanity of prose."

Laura laughed as she glanced back at him, and he contrasted her deep
contralto notes with Gerty's flute-like soprano.

"Well, he may not be right, but he is with the majority," she said.

Her indifference piqued him into the spirit of opposition, and he felt
an immediate impulse to compel her reluctant interest--to arouse her
admiration of the very qualities she now disdained.

"Well, I take my poetry where I find it," he rejoined, "and that's
mostly in life and not in books."

From the quick turn of her head, the instant's lifting of her emotional
reserve, he saw that the words had arrested her im