"Do you know," she said slowly, "I am going to like you! To like you immensely—and to trust you!"
"Thank you, I shall try to be worthy"—even his derision was gentle—"I seem to remember having been trusted before by members of your sex—even liked a little, though not perhaps 'immensely'! At any rate this certainly promises to be an experience quite by itself!"
"Quite by itself," she echoed.
"Wouldn't it be as well for you to know my name, say, as a beginning?"
"No," she nodded, "that's just what I don't want! I only want to know you. Names are extraneous things—tags, labels—let us waive them. If I tell you how I feel about this meeting of ours will you try to understand me?"
The answer was less in words than in the assent of his honest gray eyes.
"I have been surfeited all my life," she went on, "with love—I want no more of it! The one thing I do want, more than anything else, is a man friend. I have thought a great deal about such a friendship—the give and take on equal terms, the sexless companionship of mind—what it could be like!"
He brushed the twigs from the lichens between them and made no answer.
"Fate—call the power what you will"—she met the disclaimer that puckered the corners of his mouth—"fate brought us together. It was the response to my longing for such a friendship!"
"It was the Yellow Cat!"