“Good morning!”--her offered hand, cool and fresh in his. “_More_ flowers? But yesterday’s flowers are perfectly fresh! _Thank_ you, Mr. Annan, _so_ much----” She was the most engaging person to give things to--anything, no matter how trivial--and her delight and child-like lack of restraint were refreshing reward to a young man accustomed to feminine sophistication. Any sort of a package excited her, and she lost no time in opening it. Now, with her arms full of iris and peonies, she exclaimed her delight again, again made her personal gratitude a charming reward out of all proportion to the gift. “If you’ll turn on the water in the bath-tub,” she said, “I’ll lay them there until I can find something to put them in.” This was the usual procedure. He had sent her a lot of inexpensive glass bowls, jars and vases. He now gave the flowers a bath while she ran to the pantry and came back with half a dozen receptacles. Together they arranged the flowers and carried them into the three rooms of the little apartment which, already, was blossoming like a Persian garden. And all the while their desultory chatter continued--fragments left from their last parting--gossip resumed, unasked questions held over and now remembered, punctuated by the girl’s unspoiled pleasure in every blossom that she chose and placed. Breakfast was ready when they were--the sort of breakfast she remembered he liked. Nothing about Eris seemed to have been spoiled--least of all her appetite. He thought it charmingly childish, and it always amused him. Besides, the girl’s lovely freshness in the morning always fascinated him. Only children turned unblemished faces to the morning in New York. * * * * * Together in the cool living-room, after breakfast, they settled for a happy, busy morning--the business of exchanging thoughts, including vast material for discussion accumulated over night. After a year’s absence, and in the sudden sun-burst of their reunion, Eris was venturing more and more in the art of conversation. With Annan, diffidence, shyness were vanishing in their new and happy intimacy. She was learning to withhold from him nothing that concerned the things of the mind. Its pleasures she hastened to surrender to him; its perplexities she offered him with a wistful candour that constantly was stirring depths within him hitherto obscurely stagnant. All these--her personality, the physical loveliness of the girl--were subtly obsessing him, usurping intellectual routine when he was away, crowding other thoughts, colouring his mental process, interfering with its clarity when he worked--interrupting charmingly--as though her light touch on his sleeve had arrested his pen. She was asking him now about the progress of his new novel: he was lighting a cigarette, and he looked up over the burning match: “It’s an inert lump,” he said. “I come in and give it a kick but it doesn’t even squirm.” “Why?” she asked, concerned.