Page:MacGrath--The luck of the Irish.djvu/142

 still shifting about in her mind as the carriage stopped in front of the Bristol. There was to be a band concert down in the Villa Nazionale that night. William ate his dinner impatiently and hurried back to the Bristol, at that moment the center of the universe. He had to wait. So he went into the little writing-room and tried to read the Paris edition of the New York Herald. As he flung it aside he chanced to look down into the waste-basket at the side of the desk. He saw scattered bits of a photograph. Rather odd, he thought. Forgetting that the contents of a waste-basket even in a public writing-room is inviolable, he reached down and picked up a piece of the photograph. Then he recalled that the world had gone crazy over picture-puzzles two or three years before. Here was an opportunity to amuse himself until Ruth appeared.

It required less than five minutes to put the pieces together. He was dumfounded at the result. For the face of the woman he loved smiled up at him wistfully. Painstakingly he turned the bits over, in case there should be writing on the back. There was. In a masculine scrawl was written: "This is the girl."