"You are the spice of life and your name should have been Variety," he countered feebly. "But I warn you beforehand: there is a frightful lot of it. I have rewritten it from the beginning." "So much the better," she affirmed. "You've been doling it out to me in little morsels, and I've been aching to get it all at one bite." And she began to read. It was the first time he had had any of his own work read to him, and the experience was a pure luxury; at once the keenest and the most sensuous enjoyment he had ever known. Marvelling, as he was always moved to marvel, at her bright mind and clever wit and clear insight, he was driven to the superlatives again to find words to describe her reading. Artistically, and as with the gifted sympathy of a born actress, she seemed able to breathe the very atmosphere of the story. None of his subtle nuances were lost; there was never an emphasis misplaced. Better still, the impersonation was perfect. By turns she became himself, _Joan_, _Fidelia_, _Fleming_, or one of the subsidiary characters, speaking the parts, rather than reading them, with such a sure apprehension of his meaning that he could almost fancy that she was reading from his mind instead of following the manuscript. When it was over; and he could not tell whether the interval should be measured by minutes or hours; the return to the realities--the hot afternoon, the tree-shaded veranda, the lake dimpling like a sheet of molten metal under the sun-glare--was almost painful. "It is wonderful--simply wonderful!" he said, drawing a deep breath; and then, with a flush of honest confusion to drive away the work pallor: "Of course, you know I don't mean the story; I meant your reading of it. Hasn't any one ever told you that you have the making of a great actress in you, Margery, girl?" "No," she said shortly; and, dismissing that phase of the subject in the single word: "Let's talk about the story. You have bettered it immensely. What made you do it?" "I don't know; some convincement that it was all wrong and out of drawing as it stood, I suppose." "Who gave you the convincement? Miss Farnham?" His answer was meant to be truthful, but beauty of the intoxicating sort is the most mordant of solvents for truth in the abstract. "No; you did." "But she told you something," she persisted. "Otherwise, you could never have made _Fidelia_ all over again, as you have in this rewriting." "Maybe she did," he admitted. "But that doesn't matter. You think I have bettered the story, and I know I have. And I know where I got the inspiration to do it." She was smiling across at him, level-eyed.