d not be given all the information possible
concerning himself?"

"It does not concern you--that is, not directly. It is not about
you--exactly," she replied, scarcely audibly.

"But it concerns me in some way," I persisted. "It must be something
that would interest me."

"I don't know even that," she replied, venturing a momentary glance at
my face, furiously blushing, and yet with a quaint smile flickering
about her lips which betrayed a certain perception of humor in the
situation despite its embarrassment,--"I am not sure that it would
even interest you."

"Your father would have told me," I insisted, with an accent of
reproach. "It was you who forbade him. He thought I ought to know."

She did not reply. She was so entirely charming in her confusion that
I was now prompted, as much by the desire to prolong the situation as
by my original curiosity, to importune her further.

"Am I never to know? Will you never tell me?" I said.

"It depends," she answered, after a long pause.

"On what?" I persisted.

"Ah, you ask too much," she replied. Then, raising to mine a face
which inscrutable eyes, flushed cheeks, and smiling lips combined to
render perfectly bewitching, she added, "What should you think if I
said that it depended on--yourself?"

"On myself?" I echoed. "How can that possibly be?"

"Mr. West, we are losing some charming music," was her only reply to
this, and turning to the telephone, at a touch of her finger she set
the air to swaying to the rhythm of an adagio. After that she took
good care that the music should leave no opportunity for conversation.
She kept her face averted from me, and pretended to be absorbed in the
airs, but that it was a mere pretense the crimson tide standing at
flood in her cheeks sufficiently betrayed.

When at length she suggested that I might have heard all I cared to,
for that time, and we rose to leave the room, she came straight up to
me and said, without raising her eyes, "Mr. West, you say I have been
good to you. I have not been particularly so, but if you think I have,
I want you to promise me that you will not try again to make me tell
you this thing you have asked to-night, and that you will not try to
find it out from any one else,--my father or mother, for instance."

To such an appeal there was but one reply possible. "Forgive me for
distressing you. Of course I will promise," I said. "I would never
have asked you if I had fancied it could distress yo