It was a funny dinner, with an endless amount of significant bantering going on right under the Artist's sunburned nose. Yet for all the mirth of the situation, the Girl had quite a chance to study the face of her special host, in all its full detail of worldliness, of spirituality, of hardness, of sweetness. Her final impression, as her first one, was of a wonderful affinity and congeniality. "His face is like a harbor for all my stormy thoughts," was the way she described it to herself. After dinner the three washed up the dishes as sedately as though they had been working together day-in, day-out through the whole season, and after that the Artist escaped as quickly as possible to catch a cloud effect which he seemed to consider preposterously vital. Then with a dreary little feeling of a prize-pleasure all spent and gone, the Girl went over to the mirror in the sitting-room and pinned on her gray slouch hat and patted her hair and straightened her belt. But it was not her own reflection that interested her most. The mirror made a fine frame for the whole quaint room, with its dingy landscape wall-paper from which the scarlet petticoat of a shepherdess or the vivid green of a garland stood out with cheerful crudity. The battered, blackened fireplace was lurid here and there with gleams of copper kettles, and a huge gray cat purred comfortably in the curving seat of a sun-baked rocking-chair. It was a good picture to take home in your mind for remembrance, when walls should be brick and rooms ornate and life hackneyed, and the Girl shut her eyes for a second, experimentally, to fix the vision in her consciousness. When she opened her eyes again the Man was struggling through the doorway dragging a small, heavy trunk. "Oh, don't go yet!" he exclaimed. "Here are a lot of your things in this trunk. I brought them in to show you." And he dragged the trunk to the middle of the room and knelt down on the floor and commenced to unlock it. "_My_ things?" cried the Girl in amazement, and ran across the room and sat down on the floor beside him. "_My_ things?" There was a funny little twist to the Man's mouth that never relaxed all the time he was tinkering with the lock. "Yes--_your_ things," was all he said till the catch yielded finally, and he raised the cover to display the full contents to his companion's curious eyes. [Illustration: Instinctively she clasped it to her] "Oh--_books_!" she cried out, with a sudden, sweeping flush of comprehension, and darted her hand into the dusty pile and pulled out a well-worn copy of the Rubaiyat. Instinctively she clasped it to her. "I thought so!" said the Youngish Man quizzically. "I thought that was one of your books. "When Time lets slip a little, perfect hour, Oh, take it--for it will not come again." His eyes narrowed, and his hands reached nervously to regain possession of the volume. Then he laughed.