“Really, Mr. Neville?”

“Yes—­really, Mr. Neville,” he repeated, laughing—­“you bad, spoiled little beauty!  You know devilish well that if there’s any intellectual space between you and me it’s purely a matter of circumstance and opportunity.”

“Do you think me silly enough to believe that!”

“I think you clever enough to know it without my telling you.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say that.”

She was still smiling but in the depths of her eyes he felt that the smile was not genuine.

“See here,” he said, “I don’t want you to think that I don’t mean what I say.  I do.  You’re as intelligent a woman as I ever knew.  I’ve known girls more cultivated in general and in particular, but, I say again, that is the hazard of circumstance.  Is all clear between us now, Miss West?”

“Yes.”

He held out his hand; she glanced up, smiled, and laid her own in it.  And they shook hands heartily.

“Good business,” he said with satisfaction.  “Don’t ever let anything threaten our very charming accord.  The moment you don’t approve of anything I say or do come straight to me and complain—­and don’t let me divine it in your eyes, Miss West.”

“Did you?”

“Certainly I did.  Your lips were smiling but in your eyes was something that did not corroborate your lips.”

“Yes....  But how could you see it?”

“After all,” he said, “it’s part of my business to notice such things.”  He seated himself on the arm of her chair and bent over the wax model, his shoulder against hers.  And the chance contact meant nothing to either:  but what he said about men and things in the world was inevitably arousing the intelligence in her to a gratitude, a happiness, at first timid, then stirring subtly, tremulously, toward passionate response.

No man can do that to a girl and leave the higher side of her indifferent or unresponsive.  What he had aroused—­what he was awakening every day in her was what he must some day reckon with.  Loyalty is born of the spirit, devotion of the mind; and spiritual intelligence arouses fiercer passions than the sensuous emotions born of the flesh.

Leaning there above the table, shoulder to shoulder, his light finger tips caressing the wax model which she had begun, he told her clearly, and with the engaging candour which she already had begun to adore in him, all about what she had achieved in the interesting trifle before them—­explained to her wherein she had failed not only to accomplish but to see correctly—­wherein she had seen clearly and wrought intelligently.

He might have been talking to a brother sculptor—­and therein lay the fascination of this man—­for her—­that, and the pains he always took with her—­which courtesy was only part of him—­part of the wonder of this man; of his unerring goodness in all things to her.

Listening, absorbed in all that he said she still was conscious of a parallel thread of thought accompanying—­a tiny filament of innocent praise in her heart that chance had given her this man to listen to and to heed and talk to and to think about.