“Who is that fellow?” he asked in an undertone.  “I didn’t catch his name.”

Sharlee told him.

“He’s got a fine face,” observed Mr. Miller.  “I’ve made quite a study of faces, and I never saw one just like his—­so absolutely on one note, if you know what I mean.”

“What note is that?” asked Sharlee, interested by him for the only time so long as they both did live.

“Well, it’s not always easy to put a name to it, but I’d call it ... honesty.—­If you know what I mean.”

Mr. Miller stayed until half-past ten.  The door had hardly shut upon him when Byrd, too, rose.

“Oh, don’t go, Beverley!” protested Sharlee.  “I’ve hardly spoken to you.”

“Duty calls,” said Byrd.  “I’m going to walk home with Mr. Miller.”

“Beverley—­don’t!  You were quite horrid enough while he was here.”

“But you spoiled it all by being so unnecessarily agreeable!  It is my business, as your friend and well-wisher, to see that he doesn’t carry away too jolly a memory of his visit.  Take lunch downtown with me to-morrow, won’t you, Mr. Queed—­at the Business Men’s Club?  I want to finish our talk about the Catholic nations, and why they’re decadent.”

Queed said that he would, and Byrd hurried away to overtake Mr. Miller.  Or, perhaps that gentleman was only a pretext, and the young man’s experienced eye had read that any attempt to outsit the learned assistant editor was foredoomed to failure.

“I’m so glad you stayed,” said Sharlee, as Queed reseated himself.  “I shouldn’t have liked not to exchange a word with you on your first visit here.”

“Oh!  This is not my first visit, you may remember.”

“Your first voluntary visit, perhaps I should have said.”

He let his eyes run over the room, and she could see that he was thinking, half-unconsciously, of the last time when he and she had sat here.

“I had no idea of going,” he said absently, “till I had the opportunity of speaking to you.”

A brief silence followed, which clearly did not embarrass him, at any rate.  Sharlee, feeling the necessity of breaking it, still puzzling herself with speculations as to what had put it into his head to come, said at random:—­

“Oh, do tell me—­how is old Pere Goriot?”

“Pere Goriot?  I never heard of him.”

“Oh, forgive me!  It is a name we used to have, long ago, for Professor Nicolovius.”

A shadow crossed his brow.  “He is extremely well, I believe.”

“You are still glad that you ran off with him to live tete-a-tete in a bridal cottage?”

“Oh, I suppose so.  Yes, certainly!”

His frank face betrayed that the topic was unwelcome to him.  For he hated all secrets, and this secret, from this girl, was particularly obnoxious to him.  And beyond all that part of it, how could he analyze for anybody his periods of strong revolt against his association with Henry G. Surface, followed by longer and stranger periods when, quite apart from the fact that his word was given and regrets were vain, his consciousness embraced it as having a certain positive value?