"I hope you'll let me go along," he was saying coolly, "I'm really quite harmless. If you knew--if you only knew how dreadfully bored I've been, you really wouldn't mind me at all." Patricia stole a hurried glance at him, her fears curiously diminished. "I'm what the fallen call a victim of circumstances," he went on. "I ask no worse fate for my dearest enemy than to be consigned without a friend to this wilderness of whitened stoops and boarded doors--to wait upon your city's demigod, Procrastination. This I've done for forty-eight hours with a dear memory of a past but without a hope for the future. If the Fountain of Youth were to gush hopefully from the office water-cooler of my aged lawyer, he would eye it askance and sigh for the lees of the turbid Schuylkill." However she strove to lift her brows, Patricia was smiling now in spite of herself. "I've followed the meandering tide down the narrow cañon you call Chestnut Street, watched the leisurely coal wagon and its attendant tail of trolleys, or sat in my hotel striving to dust aside the accumulating cobwebs, one small unquiet molecule of disconsolation. I'm stranded--marooned. By comparison, Crusoe was gregarious." During this while they were walking north. All the way to Chestnut Street, Patricia was wondering whether to be most alarmed or amused. Of one thing she was assured, she was bored no longer. A sense of the violence done to her traditions hung like a millstone around her neck; and yet Patricia found herself peeping avidly through the hole to listen to the seductive voice of unconvention. When Patricia succeeded in summoning her voice, she was not quite sure that it was her own. "You're an impertinent person," she found herself saying. "Can't you forgive?" "No." "Circumstances are against me," he said, "but I give you my word, I've a place in my own city, a friend or two, and a certain proclivity for virtue." "Even if you do--speak to strange----" "But I don't. It was the blessed parasol. Otherwise I shouldn't have dared." "And the proclivity for virtue----" "Why, that's exactly the reason. Can't you see? It was you! You fairly exuded gentility. Come now, I'm humility itself. I've sinned. How can I expiate?" "By letting me go home to dinner." Patricia was laughing this time. The man was looking at his watch. "What a brute I am!" He stopped, took off his hat and turned away. And here it was that some little frivolous genius put unmeditated words upon Patricia's tongue. "I'm not so dreadfully hungry," she said. After all, he had been impertinent so very courteously. In a moment he was at her side again. "That was kind of you. Perhaps you've forgiven me." "N--no," with rising inflection. "Come now! Let's be friends, just for this little while. Let's begin at once to believe we've known each other always--just for to-night. I will be getting out of town to-morrow and we won't meet again. I'm certain of that."