“It—it didn’t hurt,” he repeated idiotically, to his own mortification, for he passionately aspired to say something airy and winsome; but, as he couldn’t think of anything like that, he had to let it go. “Oh, not at all,” he added feebly. However, “though not so deep as a well,” it served, ’twas enough, for she began to laugh again, and there loomed no further barrier in the way of acquaintance. Therefore it was pleasantly without constraint, and indeed as a matter of course, that he dropped into a chair beside her half an hour later, in the observation car; and something in the way she let the _Illustrated London News_ slide into the vacant chair on the other side of her might have suggested that she expected him. “I was still wondering what you must have thought of me.” This gave him an opportunity, because he had thought out a belated reply for the first time she had said it. Hence, quick as a flash, he made the dashing rejoinder: “It wasn’t so much what I thought of you, but what I thought of myself—I thought I was in heaven!” She must have known what pretty sounds her laughter made. She laughed a great deal. She even had a way of laughing in the middle of some of her words, and it gave them a kind of ripple. There are girls who naturally laugh like that; others learn to; a few won’t, and some can’t. It isn’t fair to the ones that can’t. “But you oughtn’t to tell me that,” she said. It was in the middle of “oughtn’t” that she rippled. A pen cannot express it, neither can a typewriter, and no one has yet invented a way of writing with a flute; but the effect on Henry shows what a wonderful ripple it was. Henry trembled. From this moment she had only to ripple to make Henry tremble. Henry was more in love than he had been at breakfast. Henry was a Goner. “Why oughtn’t I to?” he demanded with white intensity. “If anything’s true it’s right to tell it, isn’t it? I believe that everybody has a right to tell the truth, don’t you?” “Ye-es——” “You take the case of a man that’s in love,” said this rather precipitate gentleman; “isn’t it right for him to——” “But suppose,” she interrupted, becoming instantly serious with the introduction of the great topic—“Suppose he isn’t _really_ in love. Don’t you think there are very few cases of people truly and deeply caring for each other?”