time gratify his taste and bestow fine intellectual companionship. They talked freely with lapses of silence between them. These she would occasionally break with little snatches of song from some opera. Her familiarity with life abroad enabled her to say much which supplemented his reading and which interested him. So he was not averse to these interviews and was conscious of no danger. To her they had an increasing pleasure. She was delighted that Clancy thawed so deliberately, that instead of speedily verging toward sentiment he found more pleasure in her intellectuality than in her outward beauty. So many others to whom she had given a chance had quickly lost both their heads and hearts, and she was beginning to rejoice in the belief that it might require a summer's tactics to beguile him of either. His gray eyes, which appeared dark in the moonlight, were clearly regarding her with quiet admiration, but instead of paying a compliment he would broach some topic so interesting in itself that before she knew it she was talking well and even brilliantly. This present evening he did pay her a compliment, however, which delighted her. She had stated her view of a subject, and he had replied, "I must differ with you most decidedly, Miss Amsley." Then he added with a little apologetic laugh, "I could have made such a remark to very few ladies. I would have said, 'I beg your pardon, do not think I am contradicting you, but possibly on further reflection--' In brief, I would have gone through the whole conventional circumlocution. You are a woman of mind, and you put your views so strongly and clearly that I forget everything except your thought. Good reason why, your thought is so interesting, all the more so because it is your view, not mine, and because I do not agree with you. Have I made sufficient apology?" "You have done much more, Mr. Clancy, you have paid me the only kind of a compliment that I enjoy. I am sick of conventionalities, and as for ordinary compliments, I am as satiated as one would be if the entire contents of Huyler's candy-shop had been sent to him." "Oh, I knew that much before I had seen you five minutes. The only question in my mind was whether you had not been made ill mentally by them as one would be physically by the candy." "In other words, whether I was a fool or not." "Precisely." "Well?" "No need of that rising inflection. If you were a fool I would not be here." "I reckon not, as you say in the South." "Yet you value your beauty, Miss Ainsley." "Indeed I do, very highly." "And you know equally well that I admire it greatly, but I value your power of companionship more. Why should not a man and woman entertain each other without compliments, conventionalities and sentimentalities?" "No reason in the world if they are capable of such companionship. The trouble with so many is that they tumble into these things, especially the last, as if they were blind ditches in their path."