“Billy, can’t you give me an idea what the girl’s like?” pleaded Rex desperately.  Billy smiled up at him drowsily.  “Perfectly good girl,” he elucidated.  “Good eyes, good wind, kind to mother—­perfectly good girl in ev—­every r-respect,” he concluded, emphasizing his sentences by articulating them.  He dropped his chin into his chest with a recumbent bow, and his arm described an impressive semicircle.  “Present to her ’surances my most disting’shed consider-ration—­soon’s you find her,” and he went flop on his side and was asleep.

Rex had to give it up.  He heard the gates rattling open for the next boat-load, and took his stand again, bracing himself for another rebuff.  The usual vanguard, the usual quicksilver bunch of humanity, massing, separating, flowing this way and that, and in the midst of them a fair-haired, timid-looking young girl, walking quietly with down-cast eyes, as if unused to being in big New York alone at eight o’clock at night.  Rex stood in front of her with bared head.

“I beg your pardon,” he repeated his formula; “are you looking for Mr. Strong?”

The startled eyes lifted to his a short second, then dropped again.  “No, for Mr. Week,” she answered softly, and unconscious of witticism, melted into the throng.

This was a heavy boat-load, for it was just theater time—­they were still coming.  And suddenly his heart bounded and stopped.  Of course—­he was utterly foolish not to have known—­it was she—­Billy Strong’s bewitching cousin, the girl from Orange.  There she stood with her big, brown eyes searching, gazing here and there, as lovely, as incongruous as a wood-nymph strayed into a political meeting.  The feather of her hat tossed in the May breeze; the fading light from the window behind her shone through loose hair about her face, turned it into a soft dark aureole; the gray of her tailor gown was crisp and fresh as spring-time.  To Rex’s eyes no picture had ever been more satisfying.

Suddenly she caught sight of him, and her face lighted as if lamps had shone out of a twilight, and in a second he had her hand in his, and was talking away, with responsibility and worry, and that heavy weight on the truck back there, quite gone out of the world.  She was in it, and himself—­the world was full.  The girl seemed to be as oblivious of outside facts, as he, for it was quite two minutes, and the last straggler from the boat had disappeared into the street before she broke into one of his sentences.

“Why, but—­I forgot.  You made me forget entirely, Mr. Fairfax.  I’m going to the theater with my cousin, Billy Strong.  He ought to be here—­where is he?”

Rex shivered lest her roving eyes might answer the question, for Billy’s truck with Billy slumbering peacefully on it, lay in full view not fifty feet away.  But her gaze passed unsuspiciously over the prostrate, huddled form.

“It’s very queer—­I’m sure this was the right boat.”  She looked up at his face anxiously, and he almost moaned aloud.  What was he going to say to her?