Daisy deepened her smile and raised her face a little more, until the light of the street-lamp was reflected in tiny elfin sparklets in each of her eyes. Her lips drew to red fulness, then parted a little. Her cheeks gathered piquantly. After a moment, her lashes fell and a little hand, with irrepressibly coquettish purpose, wandered out from behind her, felt its way up to the brooch at the breast of her blouse, paused there, then was extended toward Sir William. The baronet's hand came out of his pocket. It did not meet hers, however. It went up before him, palm outward. He smiled at her over the tips of the fingers in a queer, distant way. "My dear," he said (and his words were a puzzle to Daisy), "if you were less the woman, I should perhaps like you less. But don't let the thing overpower you." With this, Sir William Ware set his hat on his head, swung his cane, and flicked a bit of pebble off the pavement. "Au revoir, little woman," he said, still ignoring the hand she had extended toward him. With this, and raising his hat quietly, he turned and walked away. Daisy, letting the unreceived hand hang before her, held out and humorously pendent, looked after her vanishing escort contemplatively. "Hmf!" she said, "no date, no nothing. Oh, well--he'll be back, if," she flushed a little, "if he wasn't fooling. I don't care, anyway." CHAPTER VIII. A KNIGHT IN THE KITCHEN. Daisy went lightly and swiftly along the gravelled walk on her return to the side-door of the great Harrison house. Her mind kept returning to certain events of the meeting, giving them a romantic tinge--the cafe, with its quiet and rich appointments and the stupendous prices named on its menu for even the ordinary things; the waiter, looking straight before him, feature-fixed as a Teddy-bear; and, most of all, the presiding spirit, the polished and pleasant man who had talked so simply and companionably and yet who, in certain unexplainable ways, had unconsciously suggested that he was "somebody great." With the whole city yet new to her--new and unexplored and fascinating--the experience through which she had just passed seemed like a chapter out of a book or a scene out of a picture-play. Looking back upon the affair now, Daisy was most amazed at her own part in it--at the strong and sane impulse which had caused her to "turn down" a proposal that, she somehow felt, if made again now, she would accept and with that acceptance drift unresistingly along the tide of a life turned to story. "I should have taken him," Daisy murmured to herself, as she turned softly the knob of the side door of Harrison's, "while I had the chance. He would have turned out all right, for he's a gentleman, and he's old enough to know his own mind."