“And she is as kind as she is gifted,” remarked Trent fervently.  Then he made his way through the assistant editors in the outer office, and hastened with his prodigious news to Gramercy Park.

Laura was alone, and after sending up his name he followed the servant to her study on the floor above, where he found her working with a pencil, as she sat before a brightly burning wood fire, over a manuscript which he saw to his surprise was not in verse.  At his glance of enquiry she smiled and laid the typewritten pages carelessly aside.

“No, it’s not mine,” she said.  “They’re several short stories which Mr. Kemper did many years ago, and he’s asked me to look over them.  I find, by the way, that they need a great deal of recasting.”

“Is it possible,” he exclaimed in amazement, “that you allow people to bore you with stuff like that?”

The smile which flickered almost imperceptibly across her lips mystified him completely, and he drew his chair a little nearer that he might bring himself directly beneath her eyes.

“Oh, well, I don’t mind it once in a while,” she returned, “though he hasn’t in the very least the literary sense.”

“But I wasn’t aware that you even knew him,” he persisted, puzzled.

“It doesn’t take long to know some people,” she retorted gayly; then as her eyes rested upon his face, she spoke with one of her sympathetic flashes of insight:  “You’ve come to bring me good news about the play,” she said.  “Benson has accepted it—­am I not right?”

“I’m jolly glad to say you are!” he assented with enthusiasm.  “It will be put on in the autumn and Benson has suggested Katie Hanska for the leading role.”

His voice died out in a joyous tremor, and he sat looking at her with all the sparkles in his young blue eyes.

“I am glad,” said Laura, and she stretched out her hand, which closed warmly upon his.  “I can’t tell you—­it’s useless to try—­how overjoyed I am.”

“I knew you’d be,” he answered softly, while his grateful glance caressed her.  The triumph of the day—­which seemed to him prophetic of the triumph of the future—­went suddenly to his head, and in some strange presentiment he felt that his emotion for Laura was bound up and made a part of his success in literature.  He could not, try as he would—­disassociate her from her books, nor her books from his, and as he sat there in ecstatic silence, with his eyes on her slender figure in its soft black gown, he told himself that the morning’s happy promise united them in a close, an indissoluble bond of fellowship.  He saw her always under the literary glamour—­he felt the full charm of the poetic genius—­the impassioned idealism which she expressed, and it became almost impossible for him to detach the personality of the woman herself from the personality of the writer whom he felt, after all, to be the more intimately vivid of the two.

“I knew you’d be,” he repeated, and this time he spoke with a passionate assurance.  “If you hadn’t been I’d have found the whole thing worthless.”