agination--that for
the first time since her entrance she had really taken in the fact of
his existence as an individual.

"Then you are not with the majority, but you are right!" she exclaimed.

"Is it not possible to be both?" he asked, pleased almost more than he
would admit by the quickening of her attention.

"I think not," she answered seriously, "don't you?"

"I never think," he laughed with his eyes upon hers, "I live."

The animation, which was like the glow from an inner illumination, shone
in her face, and he thought, as Trent had thought before him, that her
soul must burn like a golden flame within her--a flame that reached
toward life, knowledge and the veiled wonders of experience.

"And so would I if I were a man," she said.

She rose, clasping the furs at her throat, then folding Gerty in her
arms she kissed her cheek.

"I stopped for a moment to look at you, nothing more," she confessed.
"It was a choice between looking at you and at the Rembrandt in the
Metropolitan, and I chose you." As she held Gerty from her for an
instant and then drew her into her embrace again, Kemper saw that her
delight in her friend's beauty was almost a rapture, that her friendship
possessed something of a religious fervour.

"Do stay with me," pleaded Gerty; "I want you--I need you."

"But you dine out."

"Oh, I forgot. Wait, I'll break it. I'll be ill."

Laura smiled her refusal and, stooping, picked up her large, fluffy
muff.

"I'll come to-morrow," she returned, "and it won't cost us a lie. Good
bye, my bonnie, what do you wear?"

Gerty waved her hands in a gesture of unconcern.

"It rests with the fates and with Annette," she replied. "Green, blue,
white; I don't care."

"But I do," persisted Laura; "let it be white." She looked at Kemper and
bowed silently as she turned toward the door; then, hesitating an
instant, she came back and held out her hand with a cordial smile. "It
has been very pleasant to meet you," she said.

"Mayn't I at least see you down?" he asked. "How do you go?"

"There's really no need to trouble you," she answered, "I shall go a
part of the way in the stage."

She went out, and as he followed her down the staircase he asked himself
again the puzzling question: "She is different from other women--but how
is she different?" And still he assured himself with confidence that
what he liked in her was her serene separateness from the appeal of
passion. "This is the thing that la