She shook her head.  “No,” she said, but to the simple negative she added nothing affirmative.

Paul Burton remained silent, half-piqued, and she, divining his thought, smiled quietly to herself at his petulance, but finally she spoke slowly and gravely:  “You are an artist and until tonight you didn’t know of my existence.  Anything I might say would mean little to you.”

“Even,” he impulsively demanded, “if it came from the last face that faded?”

“If that is true,” she responded, “I don’t need to say anything, do I?”

To Paul’s subtly attuned nature many things came in intuitive impressions.  Now he was keenly interested because this woman whom he had met that night had told him only one thing about herself, that she belonged to a world of which, in the personal sense, his world touched only the least creditable segments.  He felt that she would not, without a much riper acquaintanceship, tell him anything more.  Yet he felt with conviction that her refinement was not only innate and true, but that of an aristocrat; that her mind was not only quick, but cultivated.  As though dropping thoughtlessly into a more musical tongue he spoke next in French, and she replied in that tongue as unconsciously as though she had not noticed his change of language.  But though he questioned persistently and skilfully until the ’bus rolled under the arch, he drew no further information from her as to herself, save that at present she was unemployed, and that her days were filled with that most cheerless of tasks, calling on managers.

He gathered that the distinguishing difference between triumph and struggle on the stage was that the managers sent for the triumphant and the struggling called uninvited.

As Paul helped Miss Terroll out of the ’bus and walked at her side the short distance between the terminal of its route and the south side of the Square he said abruptly: 

“Some day I want you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“To laugh aloud.  I suppose you sometimes do laugh aloud, don’t you?”

Her response was to break unconsciously into a peal of mirth that held in it a tinkle of soft music and spontaneity.

“I can be provoked,” she admitted and to that confession she added the inquiry, “Why do you want to hear me laugh?”

“I did want to hear you laugh because some instinct told me there would be music in it,” he assured her.  “Now I do want to hear you laugh again, and often, because I know it.”

When he had said good-night at her door and had walked across to the Brevoort cab-stand at Eighth street, he took a taxi’.  During the drive home he thought only once of Loraine Haswell.  “I must see more of Miss Terroll,” he informed himself.  “She is decidedly interesting.”

* * * * *

Hamilton Burton shoved back a mass of papers and smiled across his desk at his secretary.