"May I give you my card ?" He felt as if there was something brutally indecent in what he was doing and the knowledge of it sent a red flush to his cheeks.

The girl read his name, smiled across the table at him, and with a pretty gesture, motioned him to bring his cup and share her tea with her.

He returned to his table and when he came back with the cup in his hand she was writing on one of the pages of the tablet, which she passed across to him.
"You must pardon me for not talking," he read.

"I can hear you very well, but I, unfortunately, am a mute." He could not repress the low ejaculation of astonishment that came to his lips, and as his companion lifted her cup he saw in her face again the look that had stirred him so strangely when he stood in the window of the Hotel Windsor.

Howland was not a man educated in the trivialities of chance flirtations.