So Smith, who was blandly ignorant of the fact that propriety as strictly measured in Boston would have been aghast at his candid manner of following his inclinations, met with no obstacles save from Miss Maitland herself. She, it is true, now and again drew back when it seemed to her that their friendship was perhaps progressing too rapidly; but she was not used to men like Smith. There was nothing of the Puritan about him, nothing of the false idea that if a thing is pleasant, it must therefore be somehow sinful. On the contrary, Smith believed that with a normal person the gratification of wishes was the natural result of their possession. If he felt hungry, he ate; if he wanted to see Helen, he went and saw her. Against this hopeless lack of affectation ordinary feminine weapons were badly blunted; in fact, they came to strike Miss Maitland as rather silly. After all, if he wished to see her, why shouldn't he do so? The mere fact that he had seen her the day before was not germane. The one germane thing would have been a lack of inclination on her part to see Smith—and curiously enough, this lack did not manifest itself.
Thus it was that only a few days after their long talk about O'Connor, the same fire saw them together once more. It was Thanksgiving Eve.
"Please don't tell me you have any engagement to-night," said Smith; "for by almost superhuman effort and influence I have managed to reserve a table for three at the Café Turin at eight o'clock. May I call the Honorable Jinks and request Miss Wardrop to come and be invited to dine with me?"
"You might try," said Miss Maitland, smiling.
"Then I will."
When the dignified Jenks had limped upward on his mission, the conversation took another turn.
"You are looking very cheerful to-night," Helen remarked.
"More so than I usually do when you see me?"
"More so than the last time I saw you, at all events. Does this mean that you have correctly solved the O'Connor mystery? You really got me very much interested in it."
"No, I haven't solved it. But I have a clew—the one you gave me. If it is the right one, we shall learn very soon."