"At least," he said, "you should have seen that I was your own sort." "My own--my own sort?" She did not seem to comprehend. "Well, of your own class, then." This girl had an impish faculty for making him say things that sounded priggish: "You should have seen I was of your own class." Again her eyes widened. Then she tossed her head and laughed a little silvery laugh. He fancied the laugh disdainful, and thought so the more when she seemed to detect his suspicion and tried to allay it by an alteration of tone. "I mean exactly that," he said. She bit her red lip, and Cartaret noted that her teeth were even and white. "Forgive me," she begged. She put out her hand so frankly that he would have forgiven her anything. He took the hand and, as it nestled softer than any satin in his, he felt his heart hammer in his breast. "Forgive me," she was repeating. "I hope _you'll_ forgive _me_," he muttered. "At any rate, you can't forget me: you'll have to remember me as the greatest boor you ever met." She shook her head. "It was I that was foolish." "Oh, but it wasn't! I----" He stopped, for her eyes had fallen from his and rested on their clasped hands. He released her instantly. "Good-by," she said again. "Good---- But surely I'm to see you once in a while!" "I do not know." "Why, we're neighbors! You can't mean that you won't let me----" "I do not know," she said. "Good-by." She went out, drawing-to the shattered door behind her. Cartaret leaned against the panel and listened shamelessly. He heard her cross the hall and open the door to the opposite room; he heard her suspiciously greeted by another voice--a voice that he gladly recognized as feminine--and in a language that was wholly unfamiliar to him: a language that sounded somehow Oriental. Then he heard the other door shut, and he turned to the comfortless gloom of his own quarters. He sat down on the bed. He had forgotten a riotous dinner that was to have been his final Parisian folly, forgotten his poverty, forgotten his day of disappointment and his desire to go back to Ohio and the law. He remembered only the events of the last quarter-hour and the girl that had made them what they were. As he sat there, there seemed to come again into the silent room the perfume he had noticed when he returned. It seemed to float in on the twilight, still dimly pink behind the roofs of the gray houses along the Boul' Miche': subtle, haunting, an odor more delicate and tender than any he had ever known before. He raised his head. He saw something white lying on the floor--lying where, a few moments since, he had stood. He went forward and picked it up. It was a flower like a rose--a white rose--but unlike any rose of which Cartaret had any knowledge. It was small, but perfect, its pure petals gathered tight against its heart, and from its heart came the perfume that had seemed to him like a musical poem in an unknown tongue.