They were picking up the threads of each other’s lives and winding them together. She told him about herself--how for long stretches, while her mother had been on tour singing, she had been left in the care of maids, and her favorite game had been to play that she was a great actress. “And you’ll never guess why it was my favorite. I used to pretend that my father was in the audience and came afterwards to tell me he was proud of me. That’s why------ Do you think he would be proud of me?” “He’d be proud of you without that, wild bird.” “Why do you call me wild bird, Meester Deek? But I know: because I’m always struggling and flying beyond my strength. You think that, if I became an actress, I wouldn’t succeed. You don’t believe in me very much. I’ll have to show you--have to show you all. Everybody discourages me.” His heart was beating furiously. Where was the good of hiding things? She knew he was in earnest “My dear,” he said, and a kind disapproval came into her eyes, “I believe in you so much--more than in any woman. It isn’t that; but I’m afraid that you’ll lose so many things that you’ll some day want.” “You mean that an actress oughtn’t to marry? That’s what Fluffy says--she must be like a man and live for her art. If you married, you’d still go on sketching and writing; but men expect their wives to drop everything. It’s selfish of them and hard.” “But it’s always been like that and you’re not an actress yet, and--and, if you were, it would be terrible to think of you going through love-scenes every night with some one else.” She laughed into his eyes; he almost believed that her talk had been an ambush to lead him on. “You could be very jealous.” She rose from the table. When they were settled in the hansom, she whispered: “Let me be little again, Meester Deek. Tell me abouts knights and faeries, the way you did when you were only Teddy.” “There was once a knight,” he began, “who dreamt always of a princess whom he would marry. At last he found her, and she pretended that she didn’t want him.” “And did she?” “She did at last The title of the story is _The Princess Who Didn’t Know Her Heart_.” “Go on.” “That’s all.” “It’s very short.--That’s Miss Self-Reliance you’re holding, Meester Deek. I don’t know whether she likes it.” And again she said in a drowsy whisper, “I don’t know whether she likes it.” They both fell silent, staring straight before them into the darkness. “You don’t mind if I close my eyes, Meester Deek? I’m really tired.” He answered her with a pressure of the hand. She drooped nearer. “You are good to me.” In a husky contented little voice, she began to sing to herself. It was a darkie song about a pickaninny who had discovered that she was different from the rest of the world because the white children refused to play with her. To Teddy it seemed Desire’s pathetic way of explaining to him the loneliness of her childhood. At the end of each verse the colored mammy crooned comfortingly: