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“You’re in the room next to me, aren’t you—the one who was playing?” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone, and her voice was gutturally pleasant, so different from the high-pitched excitement of the New Yorker that he stared at her in surprise.

“Yes; I’m just about twenty miles away,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Well, I suppose I’m letting myself in for a throw-down, but here goes. Honestly, I mean what I say. I’m stranded here—don’t know a soul. I’m just craving for some one to talk to. Fact. If you’re in the same box and can size a man up for what he is, why—” he added, in an embarrassed rush, aware by the white gleam of her teeth that the girl was watching him, amused at his embarrassment—“I say, what do you do to a man who has the nerve to knock on your door and ask you to go out to dinner?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, yes; that’s what I expected. Well, I meant it all right,” he said ruefully.

“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I’m going out to dinner.”

As she said this she seemed to relax, as though satisfied of the sincerity of his appeal, and, turning, for the first time the light fell clear across her face. What the color of her eyes was in the daytime he did not know, only now, in the darkness and the artificial light, there was something luminous and deep and full, and yet they struck him as a sort of barrier held against those who sought to read deeper. These eyes looked straight into his, quiet, restrained—not quite the eyes of a young girl nor yet the eyes of a woman. The whole swift impression on him was of some one quite unlike the rest, an inflexibility of purpose, something decisive in look and attitude and, at the same time, something withheld—a flash of elfin wildness cruelly mastered.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, conscious that he had looked too intently; and he added, in blunt tribute: “Yes, of course, you would be going somewhere.”

“I’m sorry,” she said; and this time she smiled, a smile like the woman, curiously devoid of coquetry and yet at the same time haunting the imagination.

“Do you mean you would have come?” he said eagerly.

“Of course,” she said, as though this were the most natural thing in the world.

“Lord, this looks human!” he said, hungrily glancing into the studio. “Wish you could see the cell I’m in.” He hesitated a moment and then said abruptly, “I’d like—well, just to get the feeling of it—can I step in—just a moment?”

She hesitated in turn and studied his face intently.

“Just a minute, then,” she said, but she remained by the open door.

King O’Leary strode into the room over the grateful softness underneath.

“Rugs!” he said ecstatically, and he put his head back as though to inhale the welcome odor of a home. “Lord, I can just smell it!” he said. “It just warms you up—makes you feel real.”

He stood, hat in hand, his face glowing, surveying the blending shades of gray and green, the subdued glow of the table-lights, the grateful touches of warm colors here and there, and the easel covered with a cloak of mellow golden velvet that was in itself calming to look at.

“You’re an artist?” he said.

“Yes.”

She made no move to question him, watching him with a quiet sense of dignity that seemed to accord him what he needed and no more. He turned regretfully from his contemplation.

“You’re sure about dinner?”

“Yes.”

He wanted to shake hands, but her attitude did not seem to permit it. He made a last attempt.

“Say, if I annoy you with my pounding—just rap on the wall and shut me up.”

“I like it.”

“Really—anything in particular?”

“No; I like it all.”

“I’m glad of that.” He hesitated again, moved toward the door. “I’m sorry about that dinner.”

She nodded, and he thought she was still watching him with her disconcerting amusement.

“Good luck!”

The door closed, leaving King O’Leary, who had met women, good, bad, and indifferent, in many climes and held his own with Irish audacity, so thoroughly perplexed that he stood staring at the warm light playing on the glass of the door a long moment before he squared his shoulders and advanced to the next test.

II

Tootles shared the studio, which was a curiosity in itself, and a sort of refuge for indigent artists, transient reporters and just plain-a-day human beings, with Mr. Flick Wilder, who numbered among his activities (without tarrying overlong in any) journalism, all grades of publicity and press-work, advance agent, and odd theatrical jobs, special stories, and occasionally minor editorial positions, briefly held. As he aspired to a liberal position in the literary world—and by liberal, he understood a position in which he should originate the ideas that others were laboriously to execute—he had decided to take up as a steady profession (steady being used in a relative sense) the occupation of joke-smith, or joke-cracker, as he himself termed it, as one which necessitated only a trifling expense in the shape of a note-book, developed the memory, and made the companionship of witty associates a lucrative necessity. He pounded out the pun ordinary by the dozen for the comic weeklies at fifty cents an item. He dressed up anecdotes skimmed from current journalism, and fitted them to celebrities, a process which he termed “developing the property.” He seasoned English humor with the pepper of American wit. He tagged an inscription to a cartoon and supplied ideas for others ad libitum, and occasionally, by astutely padding two lines into a paragraph or a paragraph into a section, realized the colossal sum of five dollars. Daily contemplation of all things in their humorous possibilities had settled upon him a fixed gravity, a sort of distant look in the eyes, of seeking to determine whether the last man had uttered anything of value, and where others broke into laughter, he resorted to his note-book. He had seen many sides of New York in the periodic lapses which kept him constantly in search of a new profession. He had even been a dog-catcher during a week of financial stringency, when he was seeking to earn his fare from Chattanooga back to the metropolis, but he never referred to this except in moments of full confession. He had a play and a novel which he intended to complete. In tribute to this literary productivity, he liked to refer to himself as “Literature,” while addressing Tootles as “Art.”

Their association had come about six months previously, in a quite accidental manner. Tootles, who was of extravagant tastes, was immersed in a fit of hard work, in an effort to catch up with the rent, which, though only thirty dollars a month, was beyond his powers of concentration. He was at his easel, finishing up a series of commercial sketches depicting certain Olympian young men, beautiful as men are not, lolling on the seashore in the new spring styles of Wimpfheimer & Goldfinch’s twenty-five-dollar suits—a degradation which he endured against the day when the galleries of the world should contend for his masterpieces, on the practical theory that it not only kept the landlord in good humor but gave the artist himself exceptional opportunities in the matter of his own wardrobe.

The door was open, and he was aware that something unusual was taking place along the hall—from the intermittent sounds which rolled down, of loud and angry conversation—when there abruptly entered the room, and by the same token his own immediate existence, Mr. Flick