“I was thinking of music.”

“What music?”

“Just music as music.  Music as the one art which needs no background because every listening human being supplies one.  That is where it succeeds where sculpture, for instance, fails.  Music is a sort of panacea.”

“Oh!” His monosyllable was a trifle disappointed.  With such a cue she might at least have admitted his music into the summary.

The light from the overhead lamps fell in a circle of comparative radiance and he had time to note the charming modeling of her throat and a certain delicate nobility in the curve of her brow, where the soft hair merged with the dark shadowing of her hat brim.

“You haven’t carried out your part of the contract yet,” she reminded him.  “I’ve told you what, but you haven’t told me why.”

“I mean to.  Are you waiting for some one?”

“I am waiting for a ’bus to take me home.”

“Where are you going to let it take you?  Where is your home, I mean?”

“The Square,” she answered, “and there is the ’bus coming, to gather me in, and you still haven’t told me why I shocked your voice into that undernote of astonishment.”

Paul Burton smiled, and did not yet enlighten her.  Instead he went on stubbornly questioning.  “The Square does not mean Madison or Union.  I have deductive genius enough to infer that, because they’re not places of homes.  Is it Gramercy or Washington?”

The girl flashed her smile on him again and replied lightly.

“One enters my square under a marble arch and we who live there always think of it as the Square.”

“But Washington square is a long way,” he remonstrated.  “It’s a far journey to take alone.”

The girl had stepped out beyond the curb and signaled, then as the ’bus drew over and came to a stop, she nodded to the man as she started up the stair to the roof.  “Good-night, Mr. Burton,” she called over her shoulder.  “You are a good custodian of secrets.”

But the musician was climbing up after her and when she seated herself at the front he took his place beside her.  “I am going to answer all questions put to me on the way down to the Square,” he announced.

“But you have just complained that it’s a far journey.”

“I beg your pardon.  I said it was a far journey to take alone.”

She turned in her seat and looked at him.  The lips and brow were reserved, even grave, but in the green-gray eyes danced a truant twinkle.  As the heavy vehicle rumbled and lurched along the way where the asphalt fell into shadow she became a graceful silhouette of slenderness, but as they passed through the brighter zones about the great opals swung from the lamp pillars, the dimpled little chin and small nose revealed themselves in a sort of baffling warfare of sauciness and dignity.  Paul knew that there were well-held frontiers of reserve and self-containment in this woman’s nature, but that back of it lay an alluring playground of mischief.