Shirley breathed a sigh of relief.  It was so important that her identity should remain a secret.  As daughter of a Supreme Court judge she had to be most careful.  She would not embarrass her father for anything in the world.  But it was smart of Jefferson to have sent Ryder, Sr., the book, so she smiled graciously on his son as she asked: 

“How do you know he got it?  So many letters and packages are sent to him that he never sees himself.”

“Oh, he saw your book all right,” laughed Jefferson.  “I was around the house a good deal before sailing, and one day I caught him in the library reading it.”

They both laughed, feeling like mischievous children who had played a successful trick on the hokey-pokey man.  Jefferson noted his companion’s pretty dimples and fine teeth, and he thought how attractive she was, and stronger and stronger grew the idea within him that this was the woman who was intended by Nature to share his life.  Her slender hand still covered his broad, sunburnt one, and he fancied he felt a slight pressure.  But he was mistaken.  Not the slightest sentiment entered into Shirley’s thoughts of Jefferson.  She regarded him only as a good comrade with whom she had secrets she confided in no one else.  To that extent and to that extent alone he was privileged above other men.  Suddenly he asked her: 

“Have you heard from home recently?”

A soft light stole into the girl’s face.  Home!  Ah, that was all she needed to make her cup of happiness full.  Intoxicated with this new sensation of a first literary success, full of the keen pleasure this visit to the beautiful city was giving her, bubbling over with the joy of life, happy in the almost daily companionship of the man she liked most in the world after her father, there was only one thing lacking—­home!  She had left New York only a month before, and she was homesick already.  Her father she missed most.  She was fond of her mother, too, but the latter, being somewhat of a nervous invalid, had never been to her quite what her father had been.  The playmate of her childhood, companion of her girlhood, her friend and adviser in womanhood, Judge Rossmore was to his daughter the ideal man and father.  Answering Jefferson’s question she said: 

“I had a letter from father last week.  Everything was going on at home as when I left.  Father says he misses me sadly, and that mother is ailing as usual.”

She smiled, and Jefferson smiled too.  They both knew by experience that nothing really serious ailed Mrs. Rossmore, who was a good deal of a hypochondriac, and always so filled with aches and pains that, on the few occasions when she really felt well, she was genuinely alarmed.

The fiacre by this time had emerged from the Rue de Rivoli and was rolling smoothly along the fine wooden pavement in front of the historic Conciergerie prison where Marie Antoinette was confined before her execution.  Presently they recrossed the Seine, and the cab, dodging the tram car rails, proceeded at a smart pace up the “Boul’ Mich’,” which is the familiar diminutive bestowed by the students upon that broad avenue which traverses the very heart of their beloved Quartier Latin.  On the left frowned the scholastic walls of the learned Sorbonne, in the distance towered the majestic dome of the Pantheon where Rousseau, Voltaire and Hugo lay buried.