"Why did you do that?" he gasped. "I don't know," said Ambrose Sault, and with a jerk brought the steel almost straight. "Phew!" Moropulos took the bar from his hand. "I shouldn't like to annoy you seriously," he said. He did not speak of Beryl again. XIII Evie Colebrook had found a note awaiting her at the store on the morning of the day she came home early. It consisted of a few words scrawled on a plain card, and had neither address nor signature: "_Dearest girl_: I shall not be able to see you tonight. I have a long article to write and shall probably be working through the night, when your dear and precious eyes are closed in sleep. _Your lover_." She had the card under her pillow when she slept. "Are you sure you aren't too busy," said Beryl when she came down, a radiant figure, to the waiting Ronnie. "Now that you have taken up a literary career, I picture you as being rushed every hour of the day." "Sarcasm is wasted on me," Ronnie displayed his beautiful teeth. "Unflattering though it be, I admit to a slump in my literary stock. I have had no commissions for a week." "And I'm not taking you away from any of those beautiful friends of yours?" "Beryl!" he murmured reproachfully. "You know that I have no friends--if by friends you mean girl friends." "It is my mad jealousy which makes me ask these questions," she said quizzically, "come along, Ronnie, we will be late." What the play was about, Beryl never quite remembered. Ronnie, sitting in the shade of the curtains, was more interested in his companion. It was strange that he had known her ever since she was a child and he a schoolboy, and yet had never received a true impression of her beauty. He watched her through the first act, the tilt of her chin, the quick smile. "Beryl, you ought to be painted," he said in the first interval. "I mean by a portrait painter. You look so perfectly splendid that I couldn't take my eyes off you." The color came slowly and, in the dim light of the box, a man who had not been looking for this evidence of her pleasure, would have seen nothing. "That is a little less subtle than the usual brand of flattery you practice, isn't it, Ronnie? Or is your artlessness really an art that conceals art?" "I'm not flattering you--I simply speak as I feel. I never realized your loveliness until tonight." She straightened up and laughed.