While these swift emotions rather than thoughts ran through her whirling brain, he recovered himself, and greeted her with simple conventional ease, apologizing with easy grace for his wondering stare. “I fear you took me for a moon-struck lunatic--but I was beauty-struck.” So he did not intend to tell her that she had startled him by her likeness to a poor working girl whose life he had saved two years ago? It was all the better. She would be saved from the sin of evading her identity. A minute more, and they were sitting side by side on the same sofa, talking to each other with the formality of strangers, it is true, yet gazing into each other’s eyes with a more than ordinary interest. He was handsomer than ever, she was thinking, and a thrill of rapture went through her as she thought she detected in the blue eyes a look of more than conventional admiration. “What if he should love me? Oh, Heaven, the sweetness of that thought!” the girl whispered to her throbbing heart, and the warm color rose to her face, and the brown eyes filled with a happy light. “I have read your book. Is it your first one?” “Yes.” “Mr. Converse tells me that it has had a flattering success. Your wife must feel very proud of you.” She was fanning herself with useless energy--the room was not too warm--as she put this leader. “My wife!” he said, in a puzzled tone, then laughed. “I hope she will be when I get her, but just now she is in the future.” “Oh, so you are not a married man?” she exclaimed naïvely, and he shook his head, thinking to himself: “Pretty flirt! She put that leader very cleverly. She did not intend to waste herself on me if I was a benedict.” He had seen the look of pleasure on her face, and it thrilled his heart. “She is glad--so am I,” was the inward comment, for he was conscious of a dangerous intoxication in her presence, which he did not try to resist. She was so beautiful, so charming; besides, that haunting likeness about her added to the fascination she exercised over him. When they parted that night, it was with a promise of meeting on the morrow, and neither Bayard Lorraine nor Fairfax Fielding slept at all that night for thinking of each other and longing for the meeting next day. Fair had her heart’s desire. The man she had loved at first sight, whose memory she had worshiped in silence for two long years, had fallen in love with her at their first meeting. She had read it already in the frank, clear glance of the splendid blue eyes. “And only last night I wept on my pillow because I was convinced that I should never see him again,” she told herself, in rapturous wonder. CHAPTER XIX. FETTERS OF THE PAST. The two weeks that intervened before Mrs. Howard went to Florence passed like a happy dream to Fair. To love and to be loved--life has nothing else so sweet to give.