“I am indeed,” Bennington assured her sincerely.

She took on a small air of tyranny.  “Now understand me.  I mean what I say.  If you want to see me again, you must do as I tell you.  You must take me as I am, and you must mind me.”

Bennington cast a fleeting wonder over the sublime self-confidence which made this girl so certain he would care to see her again.  Then, with a grip at the heart, he owned that the self-confidence was well founded.

“All right,” he assented meekly.

“Good!” she cried, with a gleam of mischief.  “Behold me!  Old Bill Lawton’s gal!  If you want to be pards, put her thar!”

“And so you are a girl after all, and no sun fairy,” smiled Bennington as he “put her thar.”

“My cloud has melted,” she replied quietly, pointing toward the brow of Harney.

They chatted of small things for a time.  Bennington felt intuitively that there was something a little strange about this girl, something a little out of the ordinary, something he had never been conscious of in any other girl.  Yet he could never seize the impression and examine it.  It was always just escaping; just taking shape to the point of visibility, and then melting away again; just rising in the modulations of her voice to a murmur that the ear thought to seize as a definite chord, and then dying into a hundred other cadences.  He tried to catch it in her eyes, where so much else was to be seen.  Sometimes he perceived its influence, but never itself.  It passed as a shadow in the lower deeps, as though the feather mass of a great sea growth had lifted slowly on an undercurrent, and then as slowly had sunk back to its bed, leaving but the haunting impression of something shapeless that had darkened the hue of the waters.  It was most like a sadness that had passed.  Perhaps it was merely an unconscious trick of thought or manner.

After a time she asked him his first name, and he told her.

“I’d like to know your’s too, Miss Lawton,” he suggested.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me Miss Lawton,” she cried with sudden petulance.

“Why, certainly not, if you don’t want me to, but what am I to call you?”

“Do you know,” she confided with a pretty little gesture, “I have always disliked my real name.  It’s ugly and horrid.  I’ve often wished I were a heroine in a book, and then I could have a name I really liked.  Now here’s a chance.  I’m going to let you get up one for me, but it must be pretty, and we’ll have it all for our very own.”

“I don’t quite see——­” objected the still conventional de Laney.

“Your wits, your wits, haven’t you any wits at all?” she cried with impatience over his unresponsiveness.

“Well, let me see.  It isn’t easy to do a thing like that on the spur of the moment, Sun Fairy.  A fairy’s a fay, isn’t it?  I might call you Fay.”

“Fay,” she repeated in a startled tone.