"Who Is Sylvia?"

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Title:     "Who Is Sylvia?"
Author: Myra Kelly [More Titles by Kelly]

"Lemon, I think," said Miss Knowles, in defiance of the knowledge, born of many afternoons, that he preferred cream. She took a keen and mischievous pleasure in annoying this hot-tempered young man, and she generally succeeded. But to-day he was not to be diverted from the purpose which, at the very moment of his entrance, she had divined.

"Nothing, thank you," he answered. "I'll not have any tea. I came in only for a moment to tell you that I'm going to be married."

"Again?" she asked calmly, as though he had predicted a slight fall of snow. But her calm did not communicate itself to him.

"Again?" he repeated hotly. "What do you mean by 'again?'"

"Now, Jimmie," she remonstrated, as she settled herself more comfortably among her pillows and centered all her apparent attention upon a fragile cup and a small but troublesome sandwich, "don't be savage. I only mean that you always tell me so when you find an opportunity. That you even manufacture opportunities--some of them out of most unlikely material. A chance meeting in a cross-town car; an especially forte place in an opera; the moment when a bishop is saying grace or a host telling his favorite story. And yet you expect me to be surprised to hear it now! Here in my own deserted drawing-room with the fire lighted and the lamps turned low. You forget that one is allowed to remember."

"You allow yourself to forget when you choose and to remember when you wish: You are--"

"And to whom are you going to be married? To the same girl? Do you know, I think she is not worthy of you?"

"She is not," he acquiesced, and she, for a passing moment, seemed disconcerted. "Yet she is," he continued, cheered by this slight triumph, "the most persistent, industrious and deserving of all the young persons who, attracted by my great position and vast wealth, are pressing themselves or being pressed by designing relatives upon my notice."

His hostess laughed softly.

"Make allowances for them," she pleaded. "You know very few men can rival your advantages. The sixth son of a retired yet respectable stock broker, and an income of four thousand a year derived from a small but increasing--shall we say increasing--?"

"Diminishing; incredible as it may seem, diminishing."

"From a small but diminishing law practice. And with these you must mention your greatest charm."

"Which is?"

"Your humility, your modesty, your lack of self-assertiveness. Do you think she recognizes that? It is so difficult to fully appreciate your humility."

Jimmie grinned. "She's up to it," said he. "She knows all about it. She's as clever, as keen, as clear-sighted."

"Is she, perhaps, pleasing to the eye?" asked Miss Knowles idly. "Clever women are often so--well, so--"

Jimmie gazed at her across the little tea-table. He filled his eyes with her. And, since his heart was in his eyes, he filled that, too. After a moment he made solemn answer:

"She is the most beautiful woman God ever made."

"Ah, now," said Miss Knowles, returning her cup to its fellows and turning her face, and her mind, more entirely to him, "now we grow interesting. Describe her to me."

"Again?" Jimmie plagiarized.

"Yes, again. Tell me, what is she like?"

"She is like," he began so deliberately that his hostess, leaning forward, hung upon his words, "she is exactly like--nothing." The hostess sat back. "There was never anything in the least like her. To begin with, she is fair and young and slim. She is tall enough, and small enough and her eyes are gray and black and blue."

"She sounds disreputable, your paragon."

"And her eyes," he insisted, "are gray in the sunlight, blue in the lamplight, and black by the light of the moon."

"And in the firelight?"

He rose to kick the logs into a greater brightness; and when he had studied her glowing face until it glowed even more brightly, he answered:

"In the firelight they are--wonderful. She has--did I tell you?--the whitest and smallest of teeth."

"They're so much worn this year," she laughed, and wondered the while what evil instinct tempted her to play this dangerous game; why she could not refrain from peering into the deeper places of his nature to see if her image were still there and still supreme? Why should she, almost involuntarily, work to create and foster an emotion upon which she set no store, which indeed, only amused her in its milder manifestations and frightened her when it grew intense? He showed symptoms of unwelcome seriousness now, but she would have none of it.

"Go on," she urged. "Unless you give her a few more features she will be like little Red Riding Hood's grandmother."

"And she has," he proceeded obediently, "eyebrows and eyelashes--"

"One might have guessed them."

"--beyond the common, long and dark and soft. The rest of her face is the only possible setting for her eyes. It is perfection."

"And is she gentle, womanly, tender? Is she, I so often wonder, good enough to you?"

"She treats me hundreds of times better than I deserve."

"Doesn't she rather swindle you? Doesn't she let you squander your time?"--she glanced at the clock--"your substance?"--she bent to lay her cheek against the violets at her breast--"your affection upon her--?"

"And how could she be kinder? And when I marry her--"

"And if," Miss Knowles amended.

"There's no question about it," he retorted. "She knows that I shall marry her." Miss Knowles looked unconvinced. "She knows that she will marry me." Miss Knowles looked rebellious. "She knows that I shall never marry anyone else." Miss Knowles took that apparently for granted.

"Dear boy!" said she.

"That I have waited seven years for her."

"Poor boy!" said she.

"That I shall wait seven more for her."

"Silly boy!" said she.

"And so I stopped this afternoon to tell her that I'm coming home to marry her in two or three months."

"Coming home?" she questioned with not much interest. "Where are you going?"

"To Japan on a little business trip. One of the big houses wants to get some papers and testimony and that sort of thing out of a man who is living in a backwoods village there for his health--and his liberty. None of their own men can afford time to go. And I got the chance, a very good one for me--but I tire you."

"No; oh, no," said Miss Knowles politely. "You are very interesting."

"Then you shouldn't fidget and yawn. You lay yourself open to misinterpretation. To continue: a very great chance for me. The firm is a big firm, the case is a big case, and it will be a great thing for me to be heard of in connection with it."

"Some nasty scandal, of course."

"Not exactly. It is the Drewitt case. I wonder if you heard anything about it."

"For three months after the thing happened," she assured him with a flattering accession of interest, "I heard nothing about anything else. Poor, dear father knew him, to his cost, you know. I heard that there was to be a new investigation and another attempt at a settlement. And now you're going to interview the man! And you're going to Japan! Oh, the colossal luck of some people! You will write to me--won't you?--as soon as you see him, and tell me all about him. How he looks, what he says, how he justifies himself. O Jimmie, dear Jimmie, you will surely write to me?"

"Naturally," said Jimmie, and his thin, young face looked happier than it had at any other time since the beginning of this conversation; happier than it had in many preceding conversations with this very unsatisfying but charming interlocutor. "I always do. Sometimes when your mood has been particularly, well, unreceptive, I have thought of going away so that I might write to you. Perhaps I could write more convincingly than I can talk." A cheering condition of things for a lawyer, he reflected.

"But this is a different and much more particular thing," she insisted with a cruelty of which her interest made her unconscious. "I have a sort of a right to know on account of poor, dear father. I shall make a list of questions and you will answer them fully, won't you? Then I shall be the only woman in New York to know the true inwardness of the Drewitt affair. When do you start?"

"To-morrow morning. I shall be away for perhaps three months, and then," doggedly, "then I'm coming home to be married. I came in to tell you."

"And if I don't quite believe you?"

"I shall postpone the ceremony. Shall we say indefinitely, some time in the summer?"

"Not even then. Never, I think. That troublesome girl is beginning--she feels that she ought to tell you--"

"That there is another 'another'?"

"Yes, I fear so."

"Who will be in town for the next three months?"

"Again, I fear so."

"Then that's all right," said the optimistic Jimmie. "There never was a man--save one, oh, lady mine--who could, for three months, avoid boring you. When he holds forth upon every subject under the sun and stars you will think longingly of me and of the endless variety of my one topic, 'I'm going to marry you.'"

"But if he should make it his?"

"I defy him to do it. There is no guise in which he could clothe the idea which would not remind you instantly of me. If he should be poetical: well, so was I when we were twenty-one. If he should give you gifts of great price: well, so did I in those Halcyon days when I had an allowance from my Governor and toiled not. If his is an outdoor wooing, you will inevitably remember that I taught you to ride, to skate, to drive, and to play golf. If he should attack you musically, you will be surprised at the number of operas we've heard together and of duets we've sung together. And so, in the words of my friend, fellow-sufferer, and name-sake, Mr. Yellowplush, 'You'll still remember Jeames.'"

"That's nonsense!" cried Miss Knowles. "I've tried to be fond of you--I am fond of you and accustomed to you. The fatal point is that I am accustomed to you. You say you never bore me. Well, you don't. And that other men do. Well, you're right. But people don't marry people simply because they don't bore each other."

"Your meaning is clearer than your words and much more correct. This really essential consideration is, alas, frequently not considered."

"People should marry," said Miss Knowles with a sort of consecrated earnestness--the most deadly of all the practiced phases of her coquetry--"for love. Now, I'm not in love with you. If I were, the very idea of your going away would make me miserable. And do I seem miserable? Am I lovelorn? Look at me carefully and tell the truth."

Jimmie obeyed, and the contemplation of his hostess seemed to depress him.

"No," he agreed gloomily, "you seem to bear up. No one, looking at your face, could guess that your heart was in--was in--" Jimmie halted, vainly searching for the poetical word. Miss Knowles supplied it.

"In torn and bleeding fragments," she supplemented. "No, Jimmie, I'm sorry. You've laid siege to it in every known way, and yet there's not a feather out of it."

"There are two ways," Jimmie pondered audibly, "in which I have not wooed you. One is a la cave dweller. I might knock you on the head with a knobby club and drag you to my lair. But since my lair is some blocks away, and since those blocks are studded with the interested public and the uninterested police, the cave dweller's method will not serve. There remains one other. I stand before you, so; I take your hand, so; I may even have to kiss it, so. And I say: 'Dear one, I want you. Every hour of my life I want you. I want you to take care of, to work for, to be proud of. I want you to let me teach you what life means. I want you for my dearest friend, for my everlasting sweetheart, for my wife.' And when I've said it, I kiss your hand, so; gently, once again, and wait for your answer."

"Dear boy," said she with an unsteady little laugh, for--as always--she shrank from his earnestness after she had deliberately roused it, "I wish you wouldn't talk like that. You make me feel so shallow-pated and so small. I don't want to talk about life and knowledge and love. And I don't want any husband at all. What makes you so tragic this afternoon? You're spoiling our last hour together. Come, be reasonable. Tell me what you think of Drewitt. Why do you suppose he did it? Did his wife and daughter know?"

"You're quite sure about the other thing?"

"Unalterably sure. And, Jimmie, dear old Jimmie, there are two things I want you to do for me. The first is, to abandon forever and forever this 'one topic' of which, you are so proud. Will you?"

"I will not," said Jimmie.

"And the second is: to fall in love with a girl on the boat. There is always a girl on a boat. Will you?"

"I will," said Jimmie promptly. "It would be just what you deserve."

* * * * *

Miss Knowles bore the absence of her most persistent and accustomed suitor with a fortitude not predicted by that self-confident young man. She danced and drove, lunched and dined, rode and flirted with undiminished zest, bringing, each day, new energy and determination to the task of enjoying herself.

The enjoyment of her neighbors seemed less important. She preferred that her part in the cotillion should be observed by a frieze of unculled wall-flowers. A drive was always pleasanter if it were preceded by a skirmish with her mother in which Miss Knowles should come off victorious with the victoria, while Mrs. Knowles accepted the coup de grace and the coupe. A flirtation--if her languid, seeming innocent monopoly of a man's time and thoughts could be called by so gross a name--was more satisfying if it implied the breaking of vows and hearts and the mad jealousy of some less gifted sister; if it had, like a Russian folk song, a sob and a wail running through it.

Jimmie had never approved of these amusements and had never hesitated to express his opinion of them in terms which were intelligible even to her vanity. From the days when they had played together in the park she had dreaded his honesty and feared his judgments. "You're such a poacher, Sylvia," he told her once, "such an inveterate, diabolical Fly-by-Night, Will-o'-the-Wisp poacher. I sometimes think you'd condescend to take a shot at me if you didn't know that I'm fair game. But you like to kill two birds with one stone; smash two hearts with one smile."

During the weeks immediately following the departure of her mentor she devoted herself whole-heartedly to her favorite form of sport. Besides her unscrupulousness she was armed with her grandfather's name, the riches of her dead father, her own beauty, and a mind capable of much better things. And, since Jimmie's presence would have seriously interfered with the pleasures of the chase, she was rather glad than otherwise that he was not there to see--and comment.

Her mother bore his absence with a like stoicism. That astute matron had long and silently deprecated the regularity with which her Louis Quinze had groaned beneath one hundred and eighty pounds of ineligibility, the frequency with which a tall troup horse of spectacular gait and snortings could be descried beside her daughter's English hunter in the park, the strange chain of coincidence by which at theater, house party, dinner, or even church, Jimmie smiling and unabashed, would find his way to her daughter's side and monopolize her daughter's attention.

In the excitement of the first stages of one of her expeditions into another's territory, Jimmie's first letter arrived. It was mailed at Honolulu, and consisted obediently of the cryptic statement: "There is no girl on the boat. She is a widow, but lots of fun." And it changed the character of the invasion from a harmless survey of the land to a determined attack upon its fortresses. And so Gilbert Stevenson, millionaire dock owner, veteran of many seasons and more campaigns, found himself engaged to Miss Sylvia Knowles just when, after a long and careful courtship, he had decided to bestow his hand and name upon the daughter of the retired senior partner of his firm: "that dear little girl of old Marvin's," as he described the lady of his choice, "his only child and a good child, too." He bore his surprise and honors with a courteous pomposity. Miss Knowles bore the situation with restraint and decorum. But that "dear little girl of old Marvin's" could not bring herself to bear it at all and wept away her modest claims to prettiness and spirit in one desolate month.

Like many a humbler poacher, Sylvia Knowles found an embarrassment in disposing of her victims after she had bagged them, and Mr. Gilbert Stevenson was peculiarly difficult in this regard. She did not want to keep him. In fact, the engagement upon which she was enduring congratulations had been as surprising to her as to her fiance. And the methodical manifestations of his regard contrasted wearyingly with the erratic events in another friendship in which nothing was to be counted upon except the unaccountable. So that when vanquished suitors withdrew discomfited and returned to renew an earlier allegiance or to swear a new one; when "that good child of old Marvin's" had withdrawn her pitiful little face and her disappointment into the remote fastness of settlement work; when her mother resigned all claims upon the victoria and loudly affirmed her preference for the brougham, then things in general--and Mr. Stevenson in particular--began to bore Miss Knowles, and she began to look forward, with an emotion which would have surprised her betrothed, to foreign mails and letters. She considerately spared Mr. Stevenson this disquieting intelligence, having found him in matters of honor and rectitude as archaic and as fastidious as Jimmie himself. "Has a nasty suspicious mind," she reflected, "and a nasty jealous disposition. I wonder if he will expect me to give up all my friends when I marry him."

Yet even Mr. Stevenson could have found no cause for jealousy in the matter of the letters. He might have objected to their being written at all, but beyond that they were innocuous. For all the personality they contained they might have been transcripts of Jimmie's reports to his firm. He clung doggedly to his prescribed topics, and he could not have devised a surer method of arousing the curiosity and the interest of this spoiled young person. She spent hours, which should have been devoted to the contemplation of approaching bliss, in reading between the prosaic lines, in searching for sentiment in a catalogue of railway stations, for tenderness in description of eccentric tables d'hote. Finding no trace of his old gallantry in all the closely written pages, she attributed its absence to obedience and accepted it as the higher tribute to her power. She was forced to judge her lover's longing by the quantity rather than by the ardor of his words, and to detect the yearning of a true lover's heart through such effectual disguise as:

"Drewitt is a fine old chap; as placid and as bright as this country and a great deal more so than anyone you'll see in the windows of the Union League Club. He received me so cordially that I felt awkward about introducing the object of my visit, but when I had admired everything in sight from the mountains in the distance to the rug I was sitting on, I finally faced the situation and did it.

"'Dear me,' said he, 'are those directors still troubling themselves about their transaction with me?' I admitted apologetically that they were; that their books refused to close over the gap left by the vanishing of $50,000, and that he was earnestly requested to return to New York and to lend his acknowledged business acumen, etc., etc. He never turned a hair. Said they--and I--were very kind. Nothing could give him greater pleasure. But the ladies preferred Japan. Therefore he, etc., etc., etc. But he would be delighted to explain the matter fully to me; to supply me with all the figures and information I desired. (And that, of course, is as much as I am expected to bring back.) But he would have to postpone his return until--and you should have seen the whimsical, quizzical old eye of his--until the nations would agree upon new extradition treaties. Then, of course, etc., etc., etc. Meanwhile, as there was no immediate urgency about the matter, as he hoped that I would stay with them for as long a time as I cared to arrange, he would suggest that we should join Mrs. Drewitt in the garden. She would welcome news of our American friends. 'I need not ask you,' he added as we went out through the wall-like people in a dream or a fairy tale, to be discreet and casual in your conversation with the ladies. My daughter is away this week visiting an old friend of hers who is married to a missionary in a neighboring village. She knows the reason for our being here. My wife does not. It need not be discussed with either of them.' I should think not!

"And there in the garden was Mrs. Drewitt, a fat little old lady in a flaming kimono and spectacles. She wears her hair as your Aunt Matilda does, stuck to her forehead in scrolls. 'Water curls,' I think, is the technical term. She was holding the head of a dejected marigold while a native propped it up with a stick. It seemed she remembered my mother, and we spent a delightful tea-time in a garden which was a part of the same dream as the phantom wall. Then the old gentleman led me off by myself and wanted to hear all about Broadway. Whether Oscar was still at the Waldorf. Whether Fields and Weber made 'a good thing of it' apart. Then the old lady led me off by myself and wanted to know who was now the pastor of the Brick Church, and what was Maude Adam's latest play, and whether skirts were worn long or short in the street.

"'You see this dress,' she said, 'is not really made for a woman of my age. In fact, in this country all the bright and pretty colors are worn by the waitresses. Geishas they call them. But Mr. Drewitt always liked bright colors, and red is very becoming to me.' She was such a wistful, pathetic, and incongruous little figure that I said something about hoping that she would soon be in New York again. 'But,' she said, 'Mr. Drewitt cannot leave his work here. Didn't you know that he is stationed here to report the changes of the weather to Washington? It is very important, and we can't go home until he is recalled. And, besides,'" she went on with a half sob in her voice and a look in her eyes that made her seem as young as her own daughter, 'and, besides, I would much rather be here. In New York my husband was too busy. He had so many calls upon his time, so many people to meet, and so many places to go, that sometimes I hardly felt as though he belonged to me. But now for days and weeks at a time we are together. And he has no business worries. And his salary,' she brightened up to tell me, 'is almost as good here as it used to be in the Trust Company for much harder work.' She's a sweet old thing--must have been quite a beauty once--and I wish you could see old Drewitt's manner with her--so courteous and affectionate--and hers with him--so adoring and confiding. It's wonderful!

"It will take some time to get all the information I want from the old man. He has the papers and he is quite willing to explain everything, but we spend the larger part of every day in entertaining the old lady and keeping her happy and unsuspicious."

A series of such letters covering several placid weeks reduced Miss Knowles to a condition of moodiness and abstraction which all the resources at her command failed to dissipate. In vain were the practical blandishments of Mr. Stevenson; in vain her mother's shopping triumphs; in vain were dinners given in her honor and receptions at which she reigned supreme. None of her other experiments had resulted in an engagement--an immunity which she now humbly attributed to the watchful Jimmie--and she was dismayed at the determined and matter-of-fact way in which she was called upon to fulfil her promise. "If only Jimmie were at home!" she realized, "he would save me." This was when the happy day was yet a great way off. "If only Jimmie would come home," she wailed as the weeks grew to months, and even the comfort of his letters failed her. For two months there had been no news of him, and Fate--and Mr. Stevenson--were very near when, at last, she heard from him again. He sent a telegram nearly as brief as his first letter.

"I am coming home," it announced, "I am coming home, and I'm going to be married."

And the simple little words, waited for so long, remembered so clearly, and coming, at last, so late, did what all Jimmie's more eloquent pleadings had failed to do.

Sylvia Knowles, a creature made of vanities, realized that she loved better than all her other vanities her place in this one man's regard. No contemplation of Mr. Stevenson's estate on the Hudson, his shooting lodge on a Scottish moor, his English abbey, and his Italian villa could nerve her for the first meeting with Jimmie, could fortify her against his first laughing repetition:

"You married to Gilbert Stevenson," or his later scornful, "You married to Gilbert Stevenson."

So she dismissed Mr. Stevenson with as little feeling as she had annexed him, and sought comfort in the knowledge that her mother was furious, her own fortune ample, and that marrying for love was a graceful, becoming pose and an unusual thing to do.

Her rejected suitor bore his disappointment as correctly as he had borne his joy. He stormed the special center of philanthropy in which old Marvin's little girl had buried herself, and she was most incorrectly but refreshingly glad to see him. She destroyed forever his poise and his pride in it when she sat upon his unaccustomed knee, rested her tired head upon his immaculate shirt front, and wept for very happiness.

* * * * *

"And I remember," said Miss Knowles, "that you always take cream."

"Nothing, thank you," Jimmie corrected. "Just plain unadulterated tea. I learned to like it in Japan. But don't bother about it. I haven't long to stay. I came in to tell you--"

"That you're going to be married."

"How did you guess?"

"You didn't leave me to guess. Your telegram."

"Ah, yes!" quoth Jimmie. "I sent a lot of them before I sailed. But in my letters--"

"You mentioned absolutely nothing but that stupid old Drewitt affair. Never a word of the places you saw, the people you met, or even the people you missed. Nothing of the customs, the girls, the clothes. Nothing but that shuffling old Drewitt and his stuffy old wife. Nothing about yourself."

"Orders are orders," quoth Jimmie, "and those were yours to me. I remember exactly how it came about. We had been talking personalities. I have an idea that I made rather a fool of myself, and that you told me so. Then you, wisely conjecturing that I might write as foolishly as I had talked, made out a list of subjects for my letters. My name, I noted with some care, was not upon that list."

"Jimmie," said Miss Knowles, "I was cruel and heartless that day. I've thought about it often."

"You've thought!" cried the genial Jimmie. "How had you time to think? Where were all those 'anothers'?"

"There were none," lied Miss Knowles soulfully with a disdainful backward glance toward Mr. Stevenson. "For a time I thought there was one. But whenever I thought of that last talk of ours--you remember it, don't you?"

"Of course. I told you I was going to be married as soon as I came home. Well, and so I am."

"So you are. But I used to think that if you hesitated to tell me; if you felt that I might still be hard about it and unsympathetic; if you decided to confide no more in me--"

"But you would be sure to know. Even if I had not telegraphed I never could have kept it a secret from you."

"Not easily. I should have been, as you observe, sure to know. Do you remember how I always refused to believe you? It was not until you were in that horrid Japan, where all the women are supposed to be beautiful--"

"Yes," Jimmie acquiesced. "It was when I was in Japan."

"It was then that it began to seem possible that you would be married when you came home. It was then that I began to realize that I didn't deserve to be told of your plans. For I had been a fool, Jimmie. You had been a fool, too, but not in the way you think. And so, if you will sit where I sat that horrid day, we will begin that conversation all over again and end it differently. The first speech was yours. Do you remember it?"

"But I'm going to be married," said Jimmie.

"Good boy. He knows his lesson. And now I say, 'To the most beautiful woman in the world?'"

"To the most beautiful woman God ever made. The dearest, the most clever, the most simple."

"Simple," repeated Miss Knowles with some natural surprise. "Did you say simple?"

"Simple and jolly and unaffected. As true and as bright as the stars. And I'm going to marry her--"

"Now this," Miss Knowles interjected, "is where the difference comes. You are to sit quite still and listen to me because a thing like this--however long and carefully one had thought it out--is difficult in the saying. So, I stand here before you where I can look at you; for four months are long; and where you may, when I have quite finished, kiss my hand again; for again four months are long. And I begin thus: Jimmie, you are going to be married--"

"I told you first," cried Jimmie.

"But I knew it first," she countered, "to a woman who has learned to love you during the past three months, but who could not do it more utterly, more perfectly, if she had practiced through all the years that you and I have been friends."

"So she says," Jimmie interrupted with sudden heat. "So she says. God bless her!"

"And, ah, how she is fond of you. 'Fond' is a darling of a word. It keeps just enough of its old 'foolish' meaning to be human. Proud of you, glad of you, fond of you--I think that this is, perhaps, the time for you to kiss my hand."

"You're a darling," he said as he obeyed. "But what I can't understand--"

"It's not your turn. You may talk after I finish if I leave anything for you to say. See, I go on: You are going to marry--"

"The most beautiful woman in the world."

"That reminds me. What is she like? I've not heard her described for ages."

"Because there was no one in New York who could do justice to her."

"You are the knightliest of knights. Go on. Describe her."

"Well, she is neither very tall nor very small. But the grace of her, the young, surpassing grace of her, makes you know as soon as your eyes have rested on her that her height, whatever it chances to be, is the perfect height for a woman. And then there is the noble heart of her. What other daughter would have buried herself, as she has done, in a little mountain village--"

Miss Knowles looked quickly about the luxurious room, then out upon the busy avenue, then back at him, suspecting raillery. But he was staring straight through her; straight into the land of visions. His eyes never wavered when she moved slowly out of their range and sat, huddled and white-faced, in the corner of a big chair.

"And all," Jimmie went on, "so bravely, so cheerily, that it makes one's throat ache to see. And one's heart hot to see. Then there is the beauty of her. Her hair is dark, her eyes are dark, but her skin is the fairest in the world."

Miss Knowles pushed back a loose lace cuff and studied the arm it had hidden. La reine est morte, she whispered, morte, morte, morte.

"But what puzzles me,", said the genial Jimmie, "is your knowing about it all. I never wrote you a word of it, and as for Sylvia--by the way, did you know that her name, like yours, is Sylvia?"

"Yes," said Miss Knowles, "I had even guessed that her name would be Sylvia."

"You're a wonderful woman," Jimmie protested. "The most wonderful woman in the world."

"Except?"

"Except, of course, Sylvia Drewitt."

"Ah, yes," said Miss Knowles. "Yes, of course."

[The end]
Myra Kelly's short story: "Who Is Sylvia?"

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