He stood in front of her now, fresh, smiling, robust, with his look of suddenly arrested energy, and the dark red of his hair, which was still moist from his bath, striking a vivid note against the cool grays and blues of the background.  The sunshine, falling through the open window, warmed the ruddy tan of his face, and made his eyes like pools of clear light in which the jubilant spirit of the spring was reflected.  “After all, it isn’t what one does, it is what one is, that matters,” she thought while she looked at him.  “At the end, as Miss Polly said, it is character, not circumstances, that counts.”

“I’ve been all over New York this morning looking for that basket,” he said.  Though he had been so eager to make light of his services to her in her trouble, she was amused from time to time by a childlike vanity which prompted him to impress her with the value of small attentions; and this she was swift to recognize as the opposite of Arthur’s delicacy.  It was the only littleness she had observed in O’Hara so far—­this reluctance to hide his smaller lights under a bushel—­and in its place, it was amusing.  Here was an obvious instance where nature unassisted by training appeared to fall short.

“They couldn’t be lovelier if you’d gone all over the world,” she responded sincerely.

Before answering her he hesitated a moment, and she watched pityingly the struggle he was making toward an impossible self-expression.  The thing he wanted to say, the thing struggling so pathetically in the inarticulateness of his feeling, would not, she knew, be uttered in words.

“You are the first woman I ever wanted to send flowers to,” he said presently; and added with abject infelicity:  “It’s strange, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s strange,” she assented pleasantly.  Though his words were ineffectual, she was aware suddenly of a force before which she felt a vague impulse of flight.  Now, if ever, she understood that she must keep their relations as superficial as she had always meant them to be—­that she must cling with all her strength to the comfortable surface of appearances.  “But you haven’t had many women friends, have you?”

“I’ve wanted to give other things,” he went on hurriedly; “but not flowers.  I never thought of flowers until I met you.”

“That’s nice for me.”  She was growing nervous, and in her nervousness she precipitated the explosion by venturing rashly:  “But there’s Alice, too, isn’t there, to like them?” Her voice was firm and friendly.  Once for all she intended him to understand how aloof she stood from any sentimental advances.

“Alice?” For an instant his response hung fire, enveloped in a fog of perplexity.  Then, with an air of dispelling the cloud, he made a vigorous gesture of denial, and moved nearer to her with the swiftness and directness of a natural force.  “Why, Alice was you!  You were Alice all the time!” he exclaimed energetically.