“I wish you would. I’d like to know what you think of it----” Always with her in his mind typifying the average reader,----“I’ll get you my last Sunday’s story----” He jumped up and sped away like a boy eager to exhibit some new treasure. When he returned from his own room with the Sunday edition, Eris was lying back on her pillows. Something about the girl suddenly touched him. “You poor little thing,” he said, “I’m sorry you’re down and out.” Her grey eyes regarded him with a sort of astonished incredulity, as though unable to comprehend why he should concern himself with so slight a creature as herself. CHAPTER X About eight that evening Annan knocked and entered, and found Eris intent on beef tea. “How are you?” he asked in his winning, easy way, leaning down to look at her, and to inspect the broth. Her awe of him and his golden tongue made her diffident. She tried now to respond to his light, informal kindness,--meet it part way. She said, shyly, that she was quite recovered,--sat embarrassed under his amiable scrutiny, too bashful to continue eating. “I’m having two or three people to dinner,” he remarked, adjusting the camelia in his button-hole. “I hope we won’t be noisy. If we keep you awake, pound on the floor.” She thought that humorous. They both smiled. She looked at the camelia in the lapel of his dinner jacket. He leaned over and let her smell it. “Tell me,” he said with that caressing accent of personal interest which in such men is merely normal affability, “do you really begin to feel better?” She flushed, thanked him in a troubled voice. Mustering courage: “I know I must be in the way here,” she ventured; “I could get up and dress, if you’d let me, Mr. Annan----” “Dress? And go away?” “Yes.” “Go where?” “You forget what you’ve given me. I have plenty of money to take a room.” “Do you mean that commission which brought me in five hundred dollars?” “You pretend it is that way.... Yes, I mean that money.” “You funny child, I don’t want you to get up and dress. You can’t go yet. You’re not in the way here.” She said, solemn and tremulous: “I’ll never forget--your kindness----” “When you’re quite well again we’ll talk over things,” he said cheerily. He was thinking that if she found him so persuasive he’d have little trouble in starting her homeward. The front doorbell rang. He got up, gave her arm a friendly little pat. “I’ll look in later,” he said, “if you’re still awake.” He went away, lightly. She followed him with fathomless grey eyes; listened to his steps descending the stairs--heard his gay greeting, the voices of arriving guests--women’s laughter--the deeper voice of another man. After a little while she continued her interrupted dinner, gravely.