For a releasing moment or two the young man basked in the sunlight of the tawny gold hair and the half-pleading eyes, wondering the while why her face should be so wistfully melancholy. It had its allurements, this finding in a great city a strange girl ready to take an interest in one's secret aspirations, a being willing to repose in one such immediate woman's faith. Hartley's four months of loneliness and solitude had been weighing heavily on his exuberant young soul. His first impulse was to pour out his heart to her, little as she might understand, and drain the momentary cup of new-found comradeship to its last dregs. He fumbled irresolutely with his note-book, then finally decided that the doctrine of silence was best. He preferred men, he told himself, who could consume their own smoke. "You're very kind, and all that," he said almost stiffly, smiling an embarrassed smile, "but we have this promised interview of ours to finish, you know." He took up his note-book again--which he was still reportorial amateur enough to lean on in such cases. "I have your first book, and its title, and that you are a Southerner. Your girlhood was spent in Kentucky, but you say your family is really a Virginia one. I have you here as passionately fond of horses and hunting, and all that. Am I right in saying that it was your mother who rode through the Northern lines on a Kentucky thoroughbred to save that Confederate captive's life you spoke of? Good; I'll jot down a note of his name here. I think that will make an excellent little story. Then I have the anecdote about Judge Wilder and The Silver Poppy; and I can make a paragraph of your New York success, and about the novel being dramatized. Oh, yes, you would like the social element brought out, of course. There's just one other thing our editor usually asks for--if you don't mind--the age, you know," he added tentatively. "I am almost twenty-three," answered the woman. The young Oxonian buried himself in his note-book. "Yes, twenty-three," he repeated, as he penciled a note of it. He felt, as he wrote, that for some unknown reason she was laughing at him. "Why have you never written a second book?" he asked her. "I _am_ writing one," she answered quietly, he thought rather wearily, as the smile faded from her face. "Then I'd better put that in." "If you like," she added, as if uninterested. He liked her better for that second touch of diffidence. "Now there is just one point I'm not clear about. You mentioned the fact that you and Mrs. Spaulding were about to give a series of receptions--er--literary receptions, I think you called them--during the coming season. Pardon my asking, but is Mrs. Spaulding also devoted to the writing of books?" "Oh, dear me, no!" she answered. "She's only devoted to the people who happen to be doing the writing." "Then you are her guest at present?"