She seated herself on a stone bench while he stood looking down at her.  Her head was for a moment bent and something in the droop of her shoulders intimated unhappiness.

“Does my improvising music about you offend?” He put the question very gently.  “You know that I go to the piano as another man might go to his prayers.”

She looked up and shook her head.  Then she said softly.  “Offend me?  No, it makes me very proud....  I was just thinking of something else—­that troubled me.”

“Of what?” Into the two short words Paul Burton put such a sympathy as only voices of women and partly feminine men can express.

“Of the word you used just now ... captivity.”

He seated himself at her side and his hand fell to the edge of the stone bench—­where her own fingers lightly rested.  The cool satiny touch of the hand his own encountered, which she made no effort to withdraw, affected him as though a clear and silvery note had sounded near him.

Paul was one whose senses were exquisitely attuned.

“Mrs. Haswell—­Loraine,” he said, and his voice was seductively tender, “you are unhappy.”

Slowly she nodded her dark head and her voice was a whisper.  “Yes....  Paul, I’m afraid I am just that.”

It was the first time they had called each other by their first names.  It was the first time that the gradually ripening intimacy between them had had a more propitious setting than a table at Sherry’s.  Paul Burton had awaited this moment patiently, knowing that it must sometime come.  Now he bent toward her until her hair brushed his face.

“It is your right to find life a thing of joy,” he whispered.  “Your soul is a flower.  It should have the fulness and radiance of sunshine.”

“Our rights,” she said slowly, “are not always the things we get.”

“But just why are you unhappy?” he insisted.

“I guess you summed it up in that one word, Paul ... captivity.”

Paul Burton, the easily swayed, the facilely led, rose and paced up and down, and after a few moments he halted before her.

“Doesn’t he—­your jailer—­appreciate you, Loraine?”

She shrugged her lovely shoulders and looked up at him, smiling through lashes that glistened a little.

“As much, I suppose, as a man can appreciate a woman whom he fails to understand.  It’s not his fault.”

“Of course he—­cares for you?”

Loraine Haswell shot him a quick inquiring glance.  “Yes,” she smiled, “he cares enough to persecute me with little jealousies.  He cares enough to want me to make love to him when—­” she halted and put both hands over her face; through her slight figure ran a faint shudder—­“when I can’t.”

The man pressed his tapering fingers to his temples.  He must seem agitated and his emotions lay so ready to call that seeming so was almost being so.  Yet in the back of his mind was the thought:  “She will be in my arms in five minutes.”