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They got rather well acquainted that first day.

“You know,” he said, with his cup in one hand and a rather stale cake in the other, “it’s awfully bully of you to be so nice to me.”

She let that go. She was looking, as a matter of fact, after a tall man with heavily fringed eyes and English clothes, who had just gone by.

“You know,” he confided–he frequently prefaced his speeches with that–“I was horribly lonely when I came up the gangway. Then I saw you, and you were smiling. It did me a lot of good.”

“I suppose I really should not have smiled.” She came back to him with rather an effort. “But you caught me, you know. It wasn’t rouge. It was cold cream. I’ll show you.”

She unbuttoned her jacket, against his protest, and held out the little stick. He took it and looked at it.

“You don’t need even this,” he said rather severely. He disapproved of cosmetics. “You have a lovely mouth.”

“It’s rather large. Don’t you think so?”

“It’s exactly right.”

He was young, and as yet more interested in himself than in anything in the world. So he sat there and told her who he was, and what he hoped to do and, rather to his own astonishment, about the medals.

“How very brave you are!” she said.

That made him anxious. He hoped she did not think he was swanking. It was only that he did not make friends easily, and when he did meet somebody he liked he was apt to forget and talk too much about himself. He was so afraid that he gulped down his tepid tea in a hurry and muttered something about letters to write, and got himself away. The girl stared after him with a pucker between her eyebrows. And the tall man came and took the place he vacated.

Things were worrying the girl–whose name, by the way, was Edith. On programs it was spelled “Edythe,” but that was not her fault. Yes, on programs–Edythe O’Hara. The business manager had suggested deHara, but she had refused. Not that it mattered much. She had been in the chorus. She had a little bit of a voice, rather sweet, and she was divinely young and graceful.

In the chorus she would have remained, too, but for one of those queer shifts that alter lives. A girl who did a song and an eccentric dance had wrenched her knee, and Edith had gone on in her place. Something of her tomboy youth remained in her, and for a few minutes, as she frolicked over the stage, she was a youngster, dancing to her shadow.

She had not brought down the house, but a man with heavily fringed eyes, who watched her from the wings, made a note of her name. He was in America for music-hall material for England, and he was shrewd after the manner of his kind. Here was a girl who frolicked on the stage. The English, accustomed to either sensuous or sedate dancing, would fall hard for her, he decided. Either that, or she would go “bla.” She was a hit or nothing.

And that, in so many words, he told her that afternoon.

“Feeling all right?” he asked her.

“Better than this morning. The wind’s gone down, hasn’t it?”

He did not answer her. He sat on the side of the chair and looked her over.

“You want to keep well,” he warned her. “The whole key to your doing anything is vitality. That’s the word–Life.”

She smiled. It seemed so easy. Life? She was full-fed with the joy of it. Even as she sat, her active feet in their high-heeled shoes were aching to be astir.

“Working in the gymnasium?” he demanded.

“Two hours a day, morning and evening. Feel.”

She held out her arm to him, and he felt its small, rounded muscle, with a smile. But his heavily fringed eyes were on her face, and he kept his hold until she shook it off.