"But your part in the new piece--don't you get it?" he questioned. "They gave it to another woman," she told him faintly between her fingers. "A woman who--who is the friend of the author." Heretofore Paul had always felt a half-submerged diffidence with Marcia, such a partially acknowledged deference as one accords to another who has drunk deeper of life and more extensively built wisdom from experience. With her his easy pose of acknowledged genius that passed current in the drawing-rooms lost its assurance, and with her he was at his best because most natural. But this was a new Marcia, a Marcia whose delicate, childlike face was stamped with grief; a child in distress and a child who needed comforting. Just as once before, when there was no escape, Paul had fought the Marquess kid and had been astonished at the ease of battle, so now an impulse seized him and he found himself acting without premeditation. He was the man looking on at the tears of a woman, and a woman whose laughter had often been his comfort. Instinctively he folded her in his arms and kissed the soft hair which was all that showed itself of the bowed head and hidden face. Now when for the first time he held her close to him he felt a tremor of sobs run through the slender figure. His pulses heightened their tempo as he became conscious of the soft palpitation of her shoulders and bosom. Sympathy, he thought, actuated him. He took the averted face between his hands and raised it gently, but with a strong pressure until the tear-stained eyes were looking into his own. Her lips were very petal-like and her eyes were very dewy and on each cheek bloomed a spot of color heightened by the pallor of the moment. Paul Burton at the instant forgot Loraine Haswell, the prize of his brother's grand larceny for his pleasure, forgot that this woman was no more than his Platonic friend and remembered only that her chin rested in his hand and that his arm encircled her, as he bent his head and pressed his lips against the mouth that trembled. He did not think of the demonstration as necessarily loverlike. His nature was instinctive, not analytical, but suddenly there swept into the utterly lonely and battle-weary eyes of the woman, who was _not_ a child, a smile of happiness and comfort which parted her lips, so that her face reminded him of sudden sunshine flashing into rainbow hope through an April shower. He could feel the heart fluttering wildly in her breast, and at once he knew that to her his kiss had meant an avowal of love--that in her code there was no place for light or unmeaning caresses. He rose and his face paled. The indecisiveness which never dared to grasp the thistle firmly was troubling him with a new dilemma. Yet something in Marcia Terroll made a call upon him which no other woman had yet made--the call to be honest at all cost.