"Oh, Mr. Fairfield," May began with utter irrelevancy, "I--" "You promised not to call me that," he interrupted. "But it's so strange to say Dick. Well, Dick, then--" The slight interruption of a caress having been got over, she went on with her shattered observation. "What was I going to say? You put me all out, with your 'Dick'--I do think it's the dearest name!--Stop! I know what I was going to say. I was frightened almost to death when Mrs. Neligage said the Count wrote 'Love in a Cloud.' Oh, I wanted to get under the tea-table!" "But you didn't really think he wrote my letters?" "I couldn't believe it; but I didn't know what to think. Then when he wore a red carnation the next day, I thought I should die. I thought anyway he'd read the letter; and that's what made me so meek when Mrs. Neligage took hold of me." "But you never suspected that I wrote the book?" Fairfield asked. "Oh, I don't know. Sometimes it seems to me as if I really did know all the time. Don't you remember how we talked about the book at Mrs. Harbinger's tea?" "That's just your intuition," Dick returned. "I know I didn't suspect you, for it troubled me tremendously that I cared so much for you when I thought I was in love with my unknown correspondent. It didn't seem loyal." "But of course it was, you know, because there was only one of us." Dick laughed, and bestowed upon her an ecstatic little hug. "You dear little Paddy! That's a perfect bull!" She drew herself away, and pretended to frown with great dignity. "I don't care if it is a bull!" protested she. "I won't be called a Paddy!" Dick's face expressed a consternation and a penitence so marked that she burst into a trill of laughter and flung herself back into his arms. "I was just teasing," she said. "The truth is that Jack Neligage has teased me so awfully that I've caught it like the measles." The tender follies which make up the talk of lovers are not very edifying reading when set down in the unsympathetic blackness of print. They are to be interpreted, moreover, with the help of many signs, trifling in themselves but essential to a correct understanding. Looks, caresses, sighs, chuckles, giggles, pressures and claspings, intonations which alter or deny the word spoken, a thousand silly becks, and nods, and wreathèd smiles, all go to make up the conversation between the pair, so that what may be put into print is but a small portion of the ecstatic whole. May Calthorpe and Dick Fairfield were not behind in all the enchanting idiocy which belongs to a wooing, where each lover, secure in being regarded as perfection, ventures for once in a lifetime to be frankly childish, to show self without any mask of convention. "Oh, I knew you were a man of genius the very first time I saw you," May cried, in an entirely honest defiance of all facts and all evidence.