“Are you a friend of Budge’s?”

“Friend doesn’t half express it!  He made the touchdown that won me a clean hundred last season.  Outside of that I wouldn’t know him from Henry Ford.  You see how Fate binds us together.”

“Will you tell me one thing, please?” pleaded Anne Leffingwell desperately.  “Have you ever been examined for this sort of thing?”

“Not yet.  But then, you see, I’m only a beginner.  This is my first attempt.  I’ll get better as I go on.”

“Will you please crank my car?” requested Anne Leffingwell faintly.

Not until they reached Our Square did they speak again.

* * * * *

All things come to him who, sedulously acting the orchid’s part, vegetates and bides his time.  To me in the passage of days came Anne Leffingwell, to talk of many things, the conversation invariably touching at some point upon Mr. Martin Dyke—­and lingering there.  She was solicitous, not to say skeptical, regarding Mr. Dyke’s reason.  Came also Martin Dyke to converse intelligently upon labor, free verse, ouija, the football outlook, O. Henry, Crucible Steel, and Mr. Leffingwell.  He was both solicitous and skeptical regarding Mr. Leffingwell’s existence.  Now when two young persons come separately to an old person to discuss each other’s affairs, it is a bad sign.  Or perhaps a good sign.  Just as you choose.

Adopting the Mordaunt Estate’s sardonic suggestion, Martin Dyke had settled down to van life in a private alleyway next to Number 37.  Anne Leffingwell deemed this criminally extravagant since the rental of a van must be prodigious. ("Tell her not to worry; my family own the storage and moving plant,” was one of his many messages that I neglected to deliver.) On his part he worried over the loneliness and simplicity of her establishment—­one small but neat maid—­which he deemed incongruous with her general effect of luxury and ease of life, and wondered whether she had split with her family. (She hadn’t; “I’ve always been brought up like a—­a—­an artichoke,” she confided to me.  “So when father went West for six months, I just moved, and I’m going to be a potato and see how I like it.  Besides, I’ve got some research work to do.”)

Every morning a taxi called and took her to an uptown library, and every afternoon she came back to the harlequin-fronted house at Number 37.  Dyke’s hours were such that he saw her only when she returned early, for he slept by day in his van, and worked most of the night on electrical experiments which he was conducting over on the river front, and which were to send his name resounding down the halls of fame. (The newspapers have already caught an echo or two.) On his way back from his experiments, he daily stopped at the shop of Eberling the Florist, where, besides chaste and elegant set pieces inscribed “Gates Ajar” and “Gone But Not Forgotten,” one may, if expert and insistent, obtain really fresh roses.  What connection these visits had with the matutinal arrival of deep pink blossoms addressed to nobody, but delivered regularly at the door of Number 37, I shall not divulge; no, not though a base attempt was made to incriminate me in the transaction.