“Why should our illusions, if we were so fortunate as to have them, inevitably be lost?” he asked, provoked into an assurance of his interest by the serene disinclination she displayed.

“Because they invariably are if they are illusions?” she responded, “and you and I could never be absolute realities to each other, since to reach the reality in a person one must not only apprehend but comprehend as well.  I doubt if there can be any permanent friendship between people who are totally unlike.”

Half angrily he swung the stick he carried at his side.  “Then what becomes of the attraction of opposites?” he insisted.

“A catastrophe usually,” she returned.

Her composed indifference irritated him more than he was willing to admit even to himself.  Never in his recollection had he encountered a woman who showed so marked a disinclination for his society; and the wonder of her avoidance challenged him into the exercise of the personal magnetism he had always found so invincible in its attraction.  Had she met his advances with unaffected feminine eagerness, he would have parted, probably, from her at the next corner, but her polite indifference kept him, though indignant, still at her side.  Of adulation he was weary, but a positive aversion promised a new and exhilarating experience of life.

“But why are you so sure that we are opposites?” he enquired presently.

“How am I sure that you prefer fair women—­and adore an ample beauty?” she retorted lightly.  “My intuitions again!”

“Your intuitions are so numerous that they must be sometimes wrong,” he remarked.

“Oh, my intuitions are helped out by Gerty’s observation,” she laughed in response.

“Ah, I see,” he said:  and it seemed to him that he understood now her open avoidance, her barely concealed dislike, and the distant reticence which made her appear to him as remote as a star.  Gerty had whispered of his affairs—­perhaps of Madame Alta, and in Laura’s unworldly vision his delinquencies had showed strangely distorted and out of drawing.  His anger blazed up within him, yet he knew that the attraction of the woman beside him was increased rather than diminished by his resentment.

“So my pretty cousin has given me a bad character,” he observed, and his annoyance roughened his usually genial voice.

“On the other hand she admires you very much,” Laura hastened to assure him; “she sings your praises with unflagging energy.”

“Then, this, I suppose, you have counted a curse to me,” he quoted a little bitterly.

As she walked beside him she felt the contact of the nervous irritation she had provoked, and she found suddenly that almost in spite of herself she was rejoicing in the masculine quality of his presence—­in his muscular strength, in the vibrant tones of his voice and in the ardent vitality with which he moved.  But the force of his personality was a force against which she felt that she would struggle until the end.