He smiled thoughtfully down his nose. "It's really a chapter of accidents to which I'm indebted for this charming adventure," he pursued with a suavely personal nod, "beginning with the blow-out of the taxicab tire that made us five minutes late for this evening's boat. We were bound up the Sound, you understand, to spend a fortnight with a maternal aunt. And our luggage is well on its way there now. So when we missed the boat there was nothing for it but go by train. We taxied back here through that abominable storm, booked for Boston by the eleven ten, and ducked across the way to dine at the Biltmore. No good going home, of course, with the servants out—and everything. And just as we were finishing dinner this amiable sister of mine gave a whoop and let it out that she'd forgotten her jewels. Well, there was plenty of time. I put her aboard the train as soon as the sleepers were open—ten o'clock, you know—and trotted back home to fetch the loot."

A reminiscent chuckle punctuated his account, but struck no echo from Sally's humour. Moveless and mute, the girl sat unconsciously clutching the edge of the table as if it were the one stable fact in her whirling world; all her bravado dissipating as her daze of wonder yielded successively to doubt, suspicion, consternation.

"I said there was plenty of time, and so there was, barring accidents. But the same wouldn't be barred. I manufactured the first delay for myself, forgetting to ask Adele for the combination. I knew where to find it, in a little book locked up in the desk; but I hadn't a key to the desk, so felt obliged to break it open, and managed that so famously I was beginning to fancy myself a bit as a Raffles when, all of a sudden—Pow!" he laughed—"that fat devil landed on my devoted neck with all the force and fury of two hundredweight of professional jealousy!

"And then," he added, "in you walked from God knows where—"

His eyes affixed a point of interrogation to the simple declarative.

She started nervously in response, divided between impulses which she had no longer sufficient wit to weigh. Should she confess, or try to lie out of it?

Must she believe this glibly simple and adequate account or reject it on grounds of pardonable skepticism?

If this man were what he professed to be, surely he must recognise her borrowed plumage as his sister's property. True, that did not of necessity follow; men have so little understanding of women's clothing; it pleases them or it displeases, if thrust upon their attention, but once withdrawn it is forgotten utterly. Such might well be the case in this present instance; the man gave Sally, indeed, every reason to believe him as much bewildered and mystified by her as she was by him.

On the other hand, and even so . . .

The infatuate impulse prevailed, to confess and take the consequences.

"I'm afraid—" she began in a quaver.

"No need to be—none I know of, at least," he volunteered promptly, if without moderating his exacting stare.

"You don't understand—"

She hesitated, sighed, plunged in desperation. "It's no use; there's nothing for me to do but own up. What you were not to-night, Mr. Savage, I was."

"Sounds like a riddle to me. What is the answer?"

"You were just make-believe. I was the real thing—a real thief. No, let me go on; it's easier if you don't interrupt. Yes, I'll tell you my name, but it won't mean anything. I'm nobody. I'm Sarah Manvers. I'm a shop-girl out of work."

"Still I don't see . . ."

"I'm coming to that. I live on your block—the Lexington Avenue end, of course—with two other girls. And this afternoon—the studio was so hot and stuffy and lonesome, with both my friends away—I went up on the roof for better air, and fell asleep there and got caught by the storm. Somebody had closed the scuttle, and I ran across roofs looking for another that wasn't fastened down, and when I found one—it was your house—I was so frightened by the lightning I hardly knew what I was doing. I just tumbled in—"

"And welcome, I'm sure," Blue Serge interpolated.

She blundered on, unheeding: "I went all through the house, but there wasn't anybody, and—I was so wet and miserable that I—made myself at home—decided to take a bath and—and borrow some things to wear until my own were dry. And then I thought . . ."

She halted, confused, realising how impossible it would be to convince anybody with the tale of her intention merely to borrow the clothing for a single night of arabesque adventure, finding it difficult now to believe in on her own part, and hurried breathlessly on to cover the hiatus.

"And then I heard a noise on the roof. I had closed the scuttle, but I was frightened. And I crept down-stairs and—saw the light in the library and . . . That's all." And when he didn't reply promptly, she added with a trace of challenge: "So now you know!"

He started as from deep reverie.

"But why call yourself a thief—for that?"

"Because . . . because . . ." Overstrung nerves betrayed her in gusty confession. "Because it's no good blinking facts: that's what I was in my heart of hearts. Oh, it's all very well for you to be generous, and for me to pretend I meant only to borrow, and—and all that! But the truth is, I did steal—and I never honestly meant to send the things back. At first—yes; then I meant to return them, but never once they were on my back. I told myself I did, I believed I did; but deep down, all along, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't! I'm a liar as well as a thief."

"Oh, come now!" Blue Serge interjected in a tone of mild remonstrance, lounging back and eying the girl intently. "Don't be so down on yourself."

"Well, everything I've said was true except that one word 'borrow'; but that in itself was a lie big enough to eclipse every word of truth. . . . But you'll never understand—never! Men can't. They simply can't know what it is to be clothes-hungry—starving for something fit to wear—as I have been for years and years and years, as most of us in the shops are all our lives long."

"Perhaps I understand, though," he argued with an odd look. "I know what you mean, at any rate, even if I'm not ready to admit that shop-girls are the only people who ever know what it is to desire the unattainable. Other people want things, at times, just as hard as you do clothes."

"Well, but . . ." She stammered, unable to refute this reasonable contention, but, womanlike, persistent to try: "It's different—when you've never had anything. Try to think what it must be to work from eight till six—sometimes later—six days a week, for just enough to keep alive on, if you call such an existence being alive! Why, in ten years I haven't seen the country or the sea—unless you count trips to Coney on crowded trolley-cars, and mighty few of them. I never could afford a vacation, though I've been idle often enough—never earned more than ten dollars a week, and that not for many weeks together. I've lived on as little as five—on as little as charity, on nothing but the goodness of my friends at times. That's why, when I saw myself prettily dressed for once, and thought nothing could stop my getting away, I couldn't resist the temptation. I didn't know where I was going, dressed like this, and not a cent; but I was going some place, and I wasn't ever coming back!"

"Good Lord!" the man said gently. "Who'd blame you?"

"Don't sympathise with me," she protested, humanly quite unconscious of her inconsistency. "I don't deserve it. I'm caught with the goods on, literally, figuratively, and I've got to pay the penalty. Oh, I don't mean what you mean. I'm no such idiot as to think you'll have me sent to jail; you've been too kind already and—and, after all, I did do you a considerable service, I did help you out of a pretty dangerous fix. But the penalty I'll pay is worse than jail: it's giving up these pretty things and all my silly, sinful dreams, and going back to that scrubby studio—and no job—"

She pulled up short, mystified by a sudden change in the man's expression, perceiving that she was no longer holding his attention as completely as she had. She remarked his look of embarrassment, that his eyes winced from something descried beyond and unknown to her. But he was as ready as ever to recover and demonstrate that, if his attention had wandered, he hadn't missed the substance of her harangue; for when she paused he replied:

"Oh, perhaps not. Don't let's jump at conclusions. I've a premonition you won't have to go back. Here comes some one who'll have a word to say about that—or I don't know!"

And he was up before Sally had grasped his meaning—on his feet and bowing civilly, if with a twinkling countenance, to a woman who swooped down upon him in a sudden, wild flutter of words and gestures:

"Walter! Thank God I've found you! I've been so upset—hardly knew what to do—when you didn't show up. . . ."

What more she might have said dried instantly on the newcomer's lips as her gaze embraced Sally. She stiffened slightly and drew back, elevating her eyebrows to the frost-line.

"Who is this woman? What does this mean?" Without awaiting an answer to either question, she observed in accents that had all the chilling force and cutting edge of a winter wind:

"My dress! My hat!"



CHAPTER V

CONSPIRACY

"My dear sister!" interposed Mr. Savage with an imitation so exact of the woman's tone that he nearly wrung a smile even from Sally. "Do calm yourself—don't make a scene. The matter is quite easy to explain—"

"But what—"

"Oh, give us a chance. But permit me!" He bowed with his easy laugh. "Adele, this is Miss Manvers—Miss Manvers, my sister Mrs. Standish. And now"—as Sally half started from her chair and Mrs. Standish acknowledged her existence by an embittered nod—"do sit down, Adele!"

With the manner of one whose amazement has paralysed her parts of speech, the woman sank mechanically into the chair which Savage (having thoughtfully waved away the hovering waiter) placed beside the table, between himself and his guest. But once seated, precisely as if that position were a charm to break the spell that sealed them, promptly her lips reformed the opening syllables of "What does this mean?"

Mr. Savage, however, diplomatically gave her no chance to utter more than the first word.

"Do hold your tongue," he pleaded with a rudeness convincingly fraternal, "and listen to me. I am deeply indebted to Miss Manvers—for my very life, in fact. Oh, don't look so blamed incredulous; I'm perfectly sober. Now will you please give me a show?"

And, the lady executing a gesture that matched well her look of blank resignation, her brother addressed himself to a terse summing up of the affair which, while it stressed the gravity of the adventure with the fat burglar, did not seem to extenuate Sally's offence in the least and so had the agreeable upshot of leaving the sister in a much-placated humour and regarding the girl with a far more indulgent countenance than Sally had found any reason at first to hope for.

As for that young woman, the circumstance that she was inwardly all a-shudder didn't in the least hinder her exercise of that feminine trick of mentally photographing, classifying, and cataloguing the other woman's outward aspects in detail and, at the same time, distilling her more subtle phases of personality in the retort of instinct and minutely analysing the precipitate.

The result laid the last lingering ghost of suspicion that all was not as it should be between these two, that Blue Serge had not been altogether frank with her.

She had from the first appreciated the positive likeness between Mrs. Standish and the portrait in the library, even though her observation of the latter had been limited to the most casual inspection through the crack of the folding doors; there wasn't any excuse for questioning the identification. The woman before her, like the woman of the picture, was of the slender, blonde class—intelligent, neurotic, quick-tempered, inclined to suffer spasmodically from exaltation of the ego. And if she had not always been pampered with every luxury that money has induced modern civilisation to invent, the fact was not apparent; she dressed with such exquisite taste as only money can purchase, if it be not innate; she carried herself with the ease of affluence founded upon a rock, while her nervousness was manifestly due rather to impatience than to the vice of worrying.

"And now," Mr. Savage wound up with a graceless grin, "if you'll be good enough to explain what the dickens you're doing here instead of being on the way to Boston by the eleven-ten, I'll be grateful; Miss Manvers will quit doubting my veracity—secretly, if not openly; and we can proceed to consider something I have to suggest with respect to the obligations of a woman who has been saved the loss of a world of gewgaws as well as those of a man who is alive and whole exclusively, thanks to . . . Well, I think you know what I mean."

"Oh, as for that," said Mrs. Standish absently, "when you turned up missing on the train I stopped it at the Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street station and came back to find out what was the matter. I've been all through this blessed place looking for you—"

"Pardon!" Mr. Savage interrupted. "Did I understand you to say you had stopped the train?"

"Certainly. Why not? You don't imagine I was going to let myself be carried all the way to Boston in ignorance—"

"Then, one infers, the eleven-ten doesn't normally stop at One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street?"

"No. I had to speak to the conductor. Do be quiet. It doesn't matter. What were you going to say?"

"Nothing much, except that the clothes Miss Manvers stands in are hardly to be considered an adequate reward."

"True. But you mentioned some suggestion or other—"

"Without being downright about it, thereby sparing Miss Manvers any embarrassment, she might feel should you disapprove, as I'm confident you won't—"

This was the woman's turn; she silenced him with a gesture of infinite ennui. "Why is it," she complained, "that you never get anywhere without talking all around Robin Hood's barn?"

"Objection," Mr. Savage offered promptly, "on the ground of mixed metaphor."

"Objection sustained," his sister conceded. "But do come to the point."

"I wish only to remind you of the news imparted by our respected aunt in her letter of recent date."

The woman frowned slightly, as with mental effort; then a flash of comprehension lightened her blue eyes. Immediately her brows mutely circumflexed a question. A look of profound but illegible significance passed between the two. Mr. Savage nodded. Mrs. Standish pursed speculatively her thin, well-made-up lips and visibly took thought, according to the habit of her sex, by means of a series of intuitive explosions. Then she nodded vigorously and turned upon Miss Manvers a bewildering smile, for the first time addressing her directly.

"My dear," she said pleasantly enough—though, of course, the term had no accent whatever of affection—"this half-witted brother of mine once in a while stumbles upon the most brilliant inspiration imaginable. I'm sure he has seen enough of you in this last hour to be making no mistake in offering you as one answer to a very delicate question which has been distressing us both for a long time. If you're not overscrupulous . . ."

She paused with a receptive air.

"I'm sure I don't know what you're driving at," Sally said bluntly; "but I'm hardly in a position to be nice-minded about trifles."

"It's this way," Savage interposed; "we're offering you a chance to get away, to enjoy a summer by the seashore, to mix with a lot of mighty interesting people, and all that sort of thing—everything you tell me you've been pining for—if you'll consent to sail under false colours."

"Please!" Sally begged with a confused and excited little laugh.

"He simply can't help it; indirection is Walter's long suit," Mrs. Standish took up the tale. "First of all, you must know this aunt of ours is rather an eccentric—frightfully well off, spoiled, self-willed, and quite blind to her best interests. She's been a widow so long she doesn't know the meaning of wholesome restraint. She's got all the high knee-action of a thoroughbred never properly broken to harness. She sets her own pace—and Heaven help the hindermost! All in all, I think Aunt Abby's the most devil-may-care person I've ever met."

"You're too modest," Mr. Savage commented abstractedly.

"Be quiet, Walter. Aunt Abby's passionately fond of two things—cards and what she calls 'interesting people.' Neither would matter much but for the other. She gambles for sheer love of it, and doesn't care a rap whether she wins or loses. And her notion of an interesting person is anybody fortunate or misfortunate enough to be noticed by the newspapers. A bit of a scandal is sure bait for her regard . . ."

Pausing, Mrs. Standish smiled coolly. "Take me, for example. Until I found it necessary to get unmarried, my aunt never could find time to waste on me. But now, in spite of the fact that the decree was in my favour, I'm the object of her mad attachment. And if Walter hadn't come into the limelight through a Senatorial inquiry into high finance, and made such a sick witness, and got so deservedly roasted by the newspapers—well, nothing is now too good for him. So, you see, the people Aunt Abby insists on entertaining are apt to be a rather dubious lot. I don't mean she'd pick up with anybody openly immoral, you know; but she certainly manages to fill her houses—she's got several—with a wild crew of adventurers and—esses—to call 'em by their first names.

"They're smart enough, God knows, and they do make things hum, but they charge her—some of them—fat fees for the privilege of entertaining them. Funny things have happened at her card tables. So Walter and I have been scheming to find some way to protect her without rousing her resentment by seeming to interfere. If we could only get evidence enough to talk privately to some of her friends—about time-tables, for instance—it would be all right. And only recently she herself showed us the way—wrote me that she had quarrelled with her corresponding secretary, a spinster of acid maturity, and discharged her; and would we please look round for somebody to replace Miss. Matring. Do you see?"

"You mean," Sally faltered, dumfounded—"you can't mean you'll recommend me for the position?"

"I'll do more. I'll see that you get it; I'll take you with me to-night, and by to-morrow noon you'll be engaged. But you must understand we're giving you the chance solely that you may serve us as well as Aunt Abby, by keeping your eyes and ears wide open and reporting to us in strictest confidence and secrecy anything that doesn't look right to you."

"But—but I—but how—why do you think you can trust me?" the girl stammered. "Knowing what you do—"

"That's just the point. Don't you see'? We can trust you because you won't dare betray us."

"But—but after I've stolen—"

"Don't say it!" Savage cut in. "You stole nothing, if you please; you merely anticipated a reward for a service not yet rendered."

"But . . . Oh, it's kind of you, but don't you see it's impossible?"

"Nothing is impossible except your refusal," said Mrs. Standish. "Do be sensible, my dear, and realise that we—that I intend you shall have this chance. What can you possibly find to object to? The deceit? Surely an innocent deception, practised upon a dear old lady for her own good!"

"Deceit," Mr. Savage propounded very sagely, "is like any other sin, it's only sinful when it is. That's elementary sophistry, but I invented it, and I'm strong for it. Besides, we've got just twenty minutes now to get aboard the Owl—and I've got to beg, borrow, or buy transportation on it, because there wasn't a room left but the two I bought for you and me—and now Adele will have to have one of the rooms—"

"But I've nothing to wear but these things!" "Don't worry about that," Mrs. Standish reassured her. "I've got nine trunks on the way—and you unquestionably fill my things out like another perfect figure."

"But how will you explain? Who am I to be? You can't introduce me as a shop-girl out of work whom you caught stealing your clothes."

"La nuit porte conseil," Mr. Savage announced sagely, and with what was no doubt an excellent accent. "Let Adele sleep on it, and if she doesn't come through in the morning with a good, old-fashioned, all wool, yard-wide lie that will blanket every possible contingency, I don't know my little sister."

"An elder brother, let me tell you, Miss Manvers, is the best possible preceptor in prevarication."

"Elder!" exclaimed the outraged young man. "Well, of all—" He turned appealingly to Sally. "What did I tell you?"



CHAPTER VI

ALIAS MANWARING

Fickle-minded fortune favoured Mr. Savage's belated application for additional sleeping-car accommodation: somebody turned back a reservation only ten minutes or so before train-time, in consequence of which Mrs. Standish and Miss Manvers enjoyed adjoining compartments of luxury, while Mr. Savage contented himself with less pretentious quarters farther aft.

Thus it was that at one minute past one o'clock, when a preternaturally self-respecting porter dispassionately ascertained that nothing more would be required of him till morning and shut himself out of her presence, the girl subsided upon the edge of a bed of such sybaritic character as amply to warrant the designation de luxe, and, flushed and trembling with excitement (now that she dared once again to be her natural self) and with all incredulity appropriate to the circumstances, stared at the young woman who blankly stared back from a long mirror framed in the door.

It was truly a bit difficult to identify that modishly dressed and brilliantly animated young person with S. Manvers of the Hardware Notions in Huckster's Bargain Basement, while reason tottered and common sense tittered when invited to credit the chain of accidents responsible for the transformation.

Strange world of magic romance, this, into which she had stumbled over the threshold of a venial misdemeanour! Who now would dare contend that life was ever sordid, grim, and cruel, indigestible from soup to savoury? Who would have the hardihood to uphold such contention when made acquainted with the case of Sarah Manvers, yesterday's drudge, unlovely and unloved, to-day's child of fortune, chosen of a golden destiny?

Sally's jubilation was shadowed by a pensive moment; dare she assume that the winters of her discontent had been forever banished by one wave of Chance's wand?

She shook a confounded head, smiled an uncertain smile, sighed a little, broken sigh, and with determination bade adieu to misgivings, turning a deaf ear to the dull growls of mother-wit arguing that the Board of Health ought to be advised about the State of Denmark. Sufficient unto the night its room de luxe; she found her couch no less comfortable for the sword that conceivably swayed above it, suspended by a thread of casual favour.

For a time she rested serenely in the dark—only half undressed in view of the ever-possible accident—cheek to pillow, face turned to the window that endlessly screened the sweeping mysteries of that dark glimmering countryside, quite resigned so to while away the night, persuaded it was inevitable that one with so much to ponder should be unable to sleep a wink.

Deliberately, to prove this point, she closed her eyes. . . .

And immediately opened them to broad daylight, revealing, through that magic casement, the outskirts of a considerable city, street after suburban street wheeling away like spokes from a restless hub.

A simultaneous pounding on the door warned her she had but ten minutes in which to dress; no time to grasp the substance of a dream come true, no time even to prepare a confident attitude with which to salute the fairy godparents of her social debut—time only to struggle into her outer garments and muster a half-timid, deprecatory smile for those whom she was to find awaiting her in the corridor, impatient to be off, none too amiably conscious of foregone beauty sleep, accepting their protegee with a matter-of-course manner almost disillusioning.

"Got to hurry, you know," Savage informed her brusquely; "only twenty minutes to snatch a bite before our train leaves for the Island."

They hurried down a platform thronged with fellow passengers similarly haunted by the seven devils of haste, beneath a high glazed but opaque vault penning an unappetizing atmosphere composed in equal parts of a stagnant warm air and stale steam, into a restaurant that had patently been up all night, through the motions of swallowing alternate mouthfuls of denatured coffee and dejected rolls, up again and out and down another platform—at last into the hot and dusty haven of a parlour-car.

Then impressions found time for readjustment. The journey promised, and turned out, to be by no means one of unalloyed delights. The early morning temper discovered by Mrs. Standish offered chill comfort to one like Sally, saturate with all the emotions of a stray puppy hankering for a friendly pat. Ensconced in the chair beside her charge, the patroness swung it coolly aside until little of her was visible but the salient curve of a pastel-tinted cheek and buried her nose in a best-selling novel, ignoring overtures analogous to the wagging of a propitiatory tail. While Savage, in the chair beyond his sister, betrayed every evidence of being heartily grateful for a distance that precluded conversation and to a Providence that tolerated Town Topics. Sally was left to improve her mind with a copy of Vanity Fair, from contemplation of whose text and pictures she emerged an amateur adventuress sadly wanting in the indispensable quality of assurance. It wasn't that she feared to measure wits, intelligence, or even lineage with the elect. But in how many mysterious ways might she not fall short of the ideal of Good Form?

What—she pondered gloomily, chin in hand, eyes vacantly reviewing a countryside of notable charms adrowse in the lethargic peace of a mid-summer morning—what the dickens was Good Form, anyway?

Nothing, not even her own normally keen power of observation, offered any real enlightenment.

She summed up an hour's studious reflection in the dubious conclusion that Good Form had something subtly to do with being able to sit cross-kneed and look arrogantly into the impertinent lens of a camp-follower's camera—to be impudently self-conscious, that is—to pose and pose and get away with it.

The train came to a definite stop, and Sally startled up to find Mrs. Standish, afoot, smiling down at her with all her pretty features except her eyes, and Mr. Savage smiling in precisely the reverse fashion.

"All out," he announced. "Change here for the boat. Another hour, and—as somebody says Henry James says—there, in a manner of speaking, we all are."

They straggled across a wharf to a fussy small steamer, Mrs. Standish leading the way with an apprehensive eye for possible acquaintances and, once established with her brother and Sally in a secluded corner of the boat's upper deck, uttering her relief in a candid sigh.

"Nobody we know aboard," she added, smiling less tensely at Sally.

"Eh—what say'?" Mr. Savage inquired from a phase of hypnosis induced by a glimpse of Good Form in a tailored skirt of white corduroy.

"Nobody of any consequence in this mob," his sister paraphrased, yawning delicately.

"Oh," he responded with an accent of doubt. But the white corduroy vanished round a shoulder of the deck-house, and he bestirred himself to pay a little attention to Sally.

"There's the Island," he said, languidly waving a hand. "That white-pillared place there among the trees—left of the lighthouse—that's Aunt Abby's."

Sally essayed a smile of intelligent response. Not that the Island failed to enchant her; seen across a fast diminishing breadth of wind-darkened blue water, bathed in golden mid-morning light, its villas of delicious grey half buried in billows of delicious green, its lawns and terraces crowning fluted grey-stone cliffs from whose feet a broad beach shelved gently into the sea, it seemed more beautiful to Miss Manvers than anything she had ever dreamed of.

But what was to be her reception there, what her status, what her fortunes?

"I've been thinking," Mrs. Standish announced when a sidelong glance had reassured her as to their practical privacy, "about Miss Manvers."

"I hope to Heaven you've doped out a good one," Savage interrupted fervently. "In the cold grey dawn it doesn't look so good to me. But then I'm only a duffer. Perhaps it's just as well; if I'd been a good liar I might have married to keep my hand in. As it is, I never forget to give thanks, in my evening prayers, for my talented little sister."

"Are you finished?" Mrs. Standish inquired frigidly.

"I'd better be."

"Then, please pay close attention, Miss Manvers. To begin with, I'm going to change your name. From now on it's Sara Manwaring—Sara without the h."

"Manwaring with the w silent, as in wrapper and wretch?" Savage asked politely.

For Sally's benefit Mrs. Standish spelled the word patiently.

"And the record of the fair impostor?" Savage prompted.

"That's very simple. Miss Manwaring came to me yesterday with a letter of introduction from Edna English. Edna sailed for Italy last Saturday, and by the time she's back Aunt Abby will have forgotten to question Miss Manwaring's credentials."

"What did I tell you?" Mr. Savage wagged a solemn head at Sally. "There's Art for you!"

"She comes from a family prominent socially in"—Mrs. Standish paused a fraction of a second—"Massillon, Ohio—"

"Is there any such place?"

"Of course—"

"What a lot you do know, Adele!"

"But through a series of unhappy accidents involving the family fortunes was obliged to earn her own living."

"Is that all?"

"Isn't it enough?"

"Plenty. Simple, succinct, stupendous! It has only one flaw."

"And that, if you please?" Mrs. Standish demanded, bristling a trifle.

"It ain't possible for anyone to be prominent socially in a place named Massillon, Ohio. It can't be done—not in a place I never heard of before."

"Do you understand, Miss Manwaring?" the woman asked, turning an impatient shoulder to her brother.

"Perfectly," Sally assented eagerly; "only—who is Edna English?"

"Mrs. Cornwallis English. You must have heard of her."

"Oh, yes, in the newspapers . . ."

"Social uplift's her fad. She's done a lot of work among department-store girls."

"To their infinite annoyance," interpolated Savage.

"At all events, that's how she came to notice you."

"I see," said Sally humbly.

"You may fill in the outlines at your discretion," Mrs. Standish pursued sweetly. "That's all I know about you. You called at the house with the letter from Mrs. English yesterday afternoon, and I took a fancy to you and, knowing that Aunt Abby needed a secretary, brought you along."

"Thank you," said Sally. "I hope you understand how grate—"

"That's quite understood. Let us say no more about it."

"Considerable story," Savage approved. "But what became of the letter of introduction?"

"I mislaid it," his sister explained complacently. "Don't I mislay everything?"

For once the young man was dumb with admiration. But his look was eloquent.

Deep thought held the amateur adventuress spellbound for some minutes. "There's only one thing," she said suddenly, with a puzzled frown.

"And that?" Mrs. Standish prompted.

"What about the burglary? Your servants, when they came home last night, must have noticed and notified the police."

"Oh, I say!" Savage exclaimed blankly.

"Don't let's worry about that," Mrs. Standish interrupted. "We can easily let it be understood that what was stolen was later recovered from—whatever they call the places where thieves dispose of their stealings."

"That covers everything," Savage insisted impatiently. "Do come along. There's the car waiting."

Coincident with this announcement a series of slight jars shook the steamer, and with surprise Sally discovered that, without her knowledge in the preoccupation of being fitted with a completely new identity, the vessel had rounded a wooded headland, opening up a deep harbour dotted with pleasure craft, and was already nuzzling the town wharf of a sizable community.

She rose and followed her fellow conspirators aft and below to the gangway, her mind registering fresh impressions with the rapidity of a cinema film.

The grey cliff had given place to green-clad bluffs sown thick with cottages of all sorts, from the quaintly hideous and the obviously inexpensive to the bewitchingly pretty and the pretentiously ornate —a haphazard arrangement that ran suddenly into a plot of streets linking a clutter of utilitarian buildings, all converging upon the focal point of the village wharf.

Upon this last a cloud of natives and summer folk swarmed and buzzed. At its head a cluster of vehicles, horse-drawn as well as motor-driven, waited. In the shadow beneath it, and upon the crescent beach that glistened on its either side, a multitude of children, young and old, paddled and splashed in shallows and the wash of the steamer.

Obviously the less decorative and exclusive side of the island, it was none the less enchanting in Sally's vision. A measure of confidence reinfused her mood. She surrendered absolutely to fatalistic enjoyment of the gifts the gods had sent. Half closing her eyes, she drank deep of salt-sweet air vibrant with the living warmth of a perfect day.

A man whose common face was as impassive as a mask shouldered through the mob and burdened himself with the hand-luggage of the party. Sally gathered that he was valet to Mr. Savage. And they were pushing through the gantlet of several hundred curious eyes and making toward the head of the pier.

"Trying," Mrs. Standish observed in an aside to the girl. "I always say that everything about the Island is charming but the getting here."

Sally murmured an inarticulate response and wondered. Disdain of the commonalty was implicit in that speech; it was contact with the herd, subjection to its stares, that Mrs. Standish found so trying. How, then, had she brought herself so readily to accept association on almost equal terms with a shop-girl misdemeanant—out of gratitude, or sheer goodness of heart, or something less superficial?

The shadow of an intimation that something was wrong again came between Sally and the sun, but passed as swiftly as a wind-sped cloud.

The valet led to a heavy, seven-seated touring-car, put their luggage in the rear, shut the door on the three, and swung up to the seat beside the chauffeur. The machine threaded a cautious way out of the rank, moved sedately up a somnolent street, turned a corner and pricked up its heels to the tune of a long, silken snore, flinging over its shoulder two miles of white, well-metalled roadway with no appreciable effort whatever.

For a moment or two dwellings swept by like so many telegraph-poles past a car-window. Then they became more widely spaced, and were succeeded by a blurred and incoherent expanse of woods, fields, parks, hedges, glimpses of lawns surfaced like a billiard-table, flashes of white facades maculated with cool blue shadows.

Then, without warning if without a jar, the car slowed down to a safe and sane pace and swung off between two cobblestone pillars into a well-kept wilderness of trees that stood as a wall of privacy between the highroad and an exquisitely parked estate bordering the cliffs.

Debouching into the open, the drive swept a gracious curve round a wonderful wide lawn of living velvet and through the pillared porte-cochere of a long, white-walled building with many gaily awninged windows in its two wide-spread wings.

Sentinelled by sombre cypresses, relieved against a sapphire sky bending to a sea of scarcely deeper shade, basking in soft, clear sunlight, the house seemed to hug the earth very intimately, to belong most indispensably, with an effect of permanence, of orderliness and dignity that brought to mind instinctively the term estate, and caused Sally to recall (with misspent charity) the fulsome frenzy of a sycophantic scribbler ranting of feudal aristocracies, representative houses, and encroaching tenantry.

The solitary symptom of a tenantry in evidence here was a perfectly good American citizen in shirt-sleeves and overalls, pipe in mouth, toleration in his mien, calmly steering a wheelbarrow down the drive. Sally caught the glint of his cool eyes and experienced a flash of intuition into a soul steeped in contemplative indulgence of the city crowd and its silly antics. And forthwith, for some reason she found no time to analyse, she felt more at home, less apprehensive.

As the car pulled up beneath the porte-cochere a mild-eyed footman ran out to help the valet with the luggage; Savage skipped blithely down and gave a hand to his sister, offering like assistance to Sally in turn; and on the topmost of three broad, white, stone steps the chatelaine of Gosnold House appeared to welcome her guests—a vastly different personality, of course, from any in Sally's somewhat incoherent anticipations.

Going upon the rather sketchy suggestions of Mrs. Standish, the girl had prefigured Aunt Abby as a skittish female of three-score years and odd; a gabbling creature with a wealth of empty gesticulation and a parrot's vacant eye; semi-irresponsible, prone to bright colours and an overyouthful style of dress.

She found, to the contrary, a lady of quiet reserve, composed of manner, authoritative of speech, not lacking in humour, of impeccable taste in dress, and to all appearances not a day older than forty-five, despite hair like snow that framed a face of rich but indisputably native complexion.

In her regard, when it was accorded exclusively to Sally, the girl divined a mildly diverted question, quite reasonable, as to her choice of travelling costume. Otherwise her reception was cordial, with reservations; nothing warranted the assumption that Mrs. Gosnold (Aunt Abby by her legitimate title) was not disposed to make up her mind about Miss Manwaring at her complete leisure. Interim she was very glad to see her; any friend of Adele's was always welcome to Gosnold House; and would Miss Manwaring be pleased to feel very much at home.

At this point Mrs. Standish affectionately linked arms with her relation and, with the nonchalant rudeness that was in those days almost a badge of caste, dragged her off to a cool and dusky corner of the panelled reception-hall to acquaint her with the adulterated facts responsible for the phenomenon of Miss Manwaring.

"Be easy," Mr. Savage comforted the girl airily; "trust Adele to get away with it. That young woman is sure of a crown and harp in the hereafter if only because she'll make St. Peter himself believe black is white. You've got nothing to worry about. Now I'm off for a bath and nap; just time before luncheon. See you then. So-long."

He blew a most debonnaire kiss to his maternal aunt and trotted lightly up the broad staircase; and as Sally cast about for some place to wait inconspicuously on the pleasure of her betters, Mrs. Gosnold called her.

"Oh, Miss Manwaring!"

The girl responded with an unaffected diffidence apparently pleasing in the eyes of her prospective employer.

"My niece has been telling me about you," she said with an engaging smile; "and I am already inclined to be grateful to her. It isn't often—truth to tell—she makes such prompt acknowledgment of my demands. And I'm a most disorderly person, so I miss very much the services of my former secretary. Do come nearer."

Sally drew within arm's-length, and the elder woman put out a hand and caught the girl's in a firm, cool, friendly grasp.

"Your first name?" she inquired with a look of keen yet not unpleasant scrutiny.

"Sarah," said Sarah bluntly. "Man'aring" stuck in her guilty throat.

"S-a-r-a," Mrs. Standish punctiliously spelled it out.

"Thank you; I recognise it now." A shrewd, sidelong glance flickered amusement at Mrs. Gosnold's niece. "You come from the middle West, I understand, and you've had rather a hard time of it in New York. What do you do best?" "Why—I've tried to write," Sally confessed shyly.

"Oh? Novels?"

"Not quite so ambitious; short stories to begin with and then special articles for the newspapers—anything that promised to bring in a little money, but nothing ever did."

"Then, I presume, you're familiar with typewriters?"

"Oh, yes."

"And can punctuate after a fashion?"

"I think so."

"You don't look it; far too womanly, unless your appearance is deceptive, to know the true difference between a semicolon and a hyphen. No matter; you have every qualification, it seems, including a good manner and a pleasant smile. You're engaged—on probation; I mean to say, for this one week we'll consider you simply my guest, but willing to help me out with my correspondence. Then, if you like the place and I like you as much as I hope I shall, you'll become my personal secretary at a salary of twenty-five dollars a week and all expenses. No—don't thank me; thank your sensible eyes."

Mrs. Gosnold laughed lightly, gave Sally's hand a final but barely perceptible pressure, and released it.

"Now Thomas will show you your room. Mrs. Standish tells me she has promised to outfit you; her maid will bring you more suitable things by the time you've had your tub and some rest. Plenty of time; we lunch at one-thirty."

The girl stammered some sort of an acknowledgment; she was never able to recall precisely what she said, in truth, but it served. And then she was amazedly ascending the broad staircase and following the flunky's back down a long, wide, drafty corridor to a room at one extreme of the building—a small room, daintily furnished and bright with summery cretonne, its individual bath adjoining.

"I'll be sending the maid to you at once, ma'am," said Thomas, and shut the door.

Sally wandered to a window, lifted the shade, and looked out with bewildered eyes.

From the front of the house to the edge of the cliff the grounds were as severely composed as an Italian formal garden; but to one side, screened by high box hedges, a tennis-court was in the active possession of four young people, none of them, apparently over twenty years of age. Their calls and clear laughter rang in the quietness, vibrant with careless joy of living.

They did not in the least suggest the crew of adventurers which Mrs. Standish had led Sally to expect.

Thus far, indeed, Sally had failed to detect anything in the atmosphere of the establishment or in the bearing of its mistress to bear out the innuendo that Gosnold House was infested by a parasitic swarm and "Aunt Abby" the dupe of her own unholy passions. Doubts hummed in Sally's head, and she was abruptly surprised to find the view obscured by a mist of her own making—by, in short, nothing less than tears.

The simple kindliness of Mrs. Gosnold's welcome had touched the impostor more deeply than she had guessed. All this was offered her, this life of semi-idleness and luxury in this spot of poetic beauty, in return for nothing but trifling services. But she was not worthy!

A little gust of anger shook her—anger with her benefactors, that they could not have introduced her to this mundane paradise as her simple self, Miss Manvers—Sarah with the vulgar h—by her own merits and defects to stand or fall. . . .

But, as though the fates were weaving the fabric of her destiny less blindly than is their commonly reputed custom, the young woman's conscience during those few first hours had little time in which to work upon her better nature. Its first squeamish qualms, when it at length got Sally alone, were quickly counteracted by a knock at her door and what followed—the entrance of a quiet-mannered maid whose fresh-coloured countenance loomed like some amiable, mature moon above a double armful of summery apparel.

"Mrs. Standish's compliments, ma'am, and I'm bringing your things. There's more to come—as much again I'm to fetch immediate—and the rest, Mrs. Standish says, there'll be time enough for after luncheon, when all her trunks is unpacked."

Carefully depositing her burden upon the bed, she beamed acknowledgment of Sally's breathless thanks and made off briskly, to return much too soon to suit one who would have been glad of longer grace in which to become more intimately acquainted with this new donation of her ravishing good fortune.

None the less, it didn't need another double armful of beautiful things to satisfy Sally that, whatever and how many might be the faults of her benefactress, niggardliness was not of their number.

"That's all for now, and Mrs. Standish's compliments, and will you be so kind as to stop and see her, when you're dressed, before going down to lunch. It's the last door on the left, just this side the stairs. Will I turn on your bath now?"

"Please don't trouble. I—"

"No trouble at all, ma'am. Indeed, and I'm sure you'll find us all very happy to do anything we can for you. It'll be a nice change to be waiting on a pleasant-spoken person like yourself after that"— with a sniff—"Miss Matring."

"Oh!" Genuine disappointment was responsible for the exclamation. But a moment's thought persuaded Sally she had been unreasonable to hope her secret might be kept from the servants. Even if Mrs. Standish had not betrayed it to this maid, there had been that flunky, Thomas, in the reception-hall close at hand during the establishment of Sally's status, with his pose of inhuman detachment of interest—quite too perfect to be true.

"Beg pardon, ma'am?"

"Oh, nothing!" Sally swallowed her chagrin bravely. "I mean, thank you very much, but I'm accustomed to waiting on myself—except when it comes to hooks up the back—and you must have enough to keep you busy with so many people in the house."

"Not a great many just now, ma'am—not more'n a dozen, counting in Mrs. Standish and her brother and you. This has been an off week, so to speak, but they'll be arriving in plenty to-morrow and Saturday, I'm told."

That gossip was the woman's failing was a fact as obvious as that her desire was only to be friendly; brief reflection persuaded Sally that it was to her own interest neither to snub nor to neglect this gratuitous source of information. With some guilty conceit, befitting one indulging in all most Machiavellian subtlety, she let fall an extravagantly absent-minded "Yes?" and was rewarded, quite properly, with a garrulous history of her predecessor's career, from which she disengaged only two profitable impressions: that the staff of servants was devoted to their mistress, and that it would little advantage a secretary to quarrel with the one in the hope of ingratiating herself with the other.

So she contrived, as soon as might be without giving offence, to interrupt and dismiss the maid; then steeled her heart against the temptation to try on everything at once, and profited by long practice in the nice art of bathing, dressing, breakfasting, and trudging two miles in minimum time—between, that is, the explosion of a matutinal alarm and the last moment when one might, without incurring a fine, register arrival on the clock at Huckster's entrance for employees. She hadn't the slightest notion what Mrs. Standish might want of her, but she was very sure that she didn't mean to invite displeasure by seeming careless of the lady's whims.

Consequently it was surprisingly soon that she stood, refreshed and comfortable in white linen, tapping at the door that Emmy, the maid, had designated.

Another maid, less prepossessing, admitted her to the dressing-room of the woman of fashion; and this last greeted Sally with a fretful, preoccupied frown, visible in the mirror, which reflected as well the excellent results obtainable from discreet employment of a high-keyed palette.

"Oh, it's you!" said Mrs. Standish shortly. "I was hoping you wouldn't be forever. Though you do look well in those duds. I've something quite important to say. You may go now, Ellen; I sha'n't want you again until evening."

With a scowl Ellen made off, an effort of masterly self-restraint alone enabling her to refrain from slamming the door.

"A most ridiculous thing has happened," Mrs. Standish pursued, delicately lining in her devastating eyebrows—"most annoying!" She jerked an impatient thumb at a telegram that lay open on the dressing-table. "Read that. It was waiting our arrival."

Sally obeyed with an opening wonder that swiftly gave place to panic consternation.

House entered by burglars last night discovered this morning forced entrance by scuttle extent of loss unknown but desk broken open safe cleaned out dining-room silver gone some clothing dresses missing one of gang evidently woman garments left in bath-room name indelible ink faded but apparently manners or manvers police notified detectives on case advise return please wire instructions-Riggs.

"Now don't have hysterics!" Mrs. Standish snapped as Sally, with a low cry of dismay, sank stunned into a chair. "There's nothing for you to fret about—you're all right, here, with me, under my protection. Nobody's going to look for you here; but think how fortunate it was I had the wit to change your name. No, it's I who have to worry!"

"But I don't understand," the girl stammered. "Of course there must be some mistake; you haven't really lost anything—"

"Oh, haven't I? I wish I could believe that. Don't you see what the telegram says—'safe cleaned out, dining-room silver gone'? That sounds suspiciously like a loss to me. Walter didn't 'clean out' the safe, and of course he didn't touch the silver. On the contrary, he's positive he shut the safe and fixed the combination before leaving. As for the dining-room, he didn't once set foot in it."

"Then—that burglar must have come back."

"That's our theory, naturally. Walter was so sure he'd scared the man off, he simply left the scuttle closed—"

"But he told me he found hammer and nails and fastened it up securely!"

"That was just his blague; he was having a good time, pretending to be what you took him for—an amateur cracksman; he made up that story to fool you. The truth is, he made an uncommonly asinine exhibition, even for Walter—so excited and upset by that fight with the real burglar, to say nothing of the mystery of your interference, that he didn't stop to make sure he had got hold of the right jewel-case. As a matter of fact, he hadn't; everything I own of any real value was left behind; what Walter brought me was an old case containing a lot of trinkets worth little or nothing aside from sentimental associations."

"Oh, I am so sorry!"

"I'm sure you are, but that doesn't mend matters. The only thing that will is for you to make good here and keep away from New York until the whole affair has blown over and, above all, never, under any consideration, breathe a word of the truth to a living soul."

"I'm hardly likely to do that, Mrs. Standish; it wouldn't—"

"But you might. I've got to warn you. Everything depends on secrecy. Suppose some one were to question you, and you thought you had to tell the truth—a detective, for instance. It's not unlikely that one may come down here to interview me. Walter is leaving for New York by the first boat—in hopes of preventing anything of the sort—but still it isn't impossible. And if it ever comes out that Walter was in the house last night after dark—well, you can see for yourself what chance we'll have of making the burglar-insurance people pay us for what we've lost!"



CHAPTER VII

FRAUD

At Gosnold House that day, in an airy dining-room from which sunlight was jealously excluded by Venetian blinds at every long, wide window, creating an oasis of cool twilight in the arid heart of day, ten persons sat at luncheon—a meal of few and simple courses, but admirably ordered and served upon a clothless expanse of dark mahogany, relieved at each place by little squares of lace and fine linen, and in the center by a great, brazen bowl of vivid roses.

In this strange atmosphere the outsider maintained a covertly watchful silence (which, if rarely interrupted, was altogether of her own election) and was happily guiltless of any positive fault; long proscription to the social hinterland of dingy boarding-houses, smug quick-lunch rooms, and casual studio feeding had not affected her nice feeling for the sensible thing at table. She possessed, furthermore, in full measure that amazing adaptability which seems to be innate with most American women of any walk in life; whatever she might lack to her detriment or embarrassment she was quick to mark, learn, assimilate, and make as much her own as if she had never been without it.

And then—for in spite of reassurances persistently iterated by Mrs. Standish, the news from New York troubled her profoundly—preoccupation largely counteracted self-consciousness through those first few dreaded moments of Sally's modest social debut.

The men on either side of her she found severally, if quite amiably, agreeable to indulge her reticence. Savage, for one, was secretly, she guessed, quite as much disconcerted by the reported contretemps in town; but he dissembled well, with a show of whimsical exasperation because of this emergency that tore him so soon away from both Gosnold House and his other neighbour at table, a Mrs. Artemas—a spirited, mercurial creature, not over-handsome of face, but wonderfully smart in dress and gesture, superbly stayed and well aware of it; a dark, fine woman who recognised the rivalry latent in Sally's dark looks without dismay—as Sally conceded she might well.

On her other hand sat a handsome, well-bred boy of eighteen or so, one of the tennis four, answering to the name of Bob—evidently a cheerful soul, but at ease in the persuasion that comparative children should be seen and so forth. His partner of the courts sat next him—name, Babs—a frank-eyed, wholesome girl, perhaps a year his senior. Their surnames did not transpire, but they impressed Sally, and correctly, as unrelated save in community of unsentimental interests. The other players were not present.

Aside from these, the faces strange to her were those of a Miss Pride and Messrs. Lyttleton and Trego.

The last-named impressed her as a trifle ill at ease, possibly because of the blandishments of Mrs. Artemas, who had openly singled him out to be her special prey, and discovered an attitude of proprietorship to which he could not be said to respond with the ardour of a passionate, impulsive nature. A youngish man, with a heavy body, a bit ungainly in carriage, Mr. Trego had a square-jawed face with heavy-lidded, tranquil eyes. When circumstances demanded, he seemed capable of expressing himself simply and to the point, with a sure-footed if crushing wit. In white flannels his broad-shouldered bulk dwarfed the other men to insignificance.

Mr. Lyttleton—assigned to entertain his hostess, and (or Mrs. Gosnold flattered him) scoring heavily in that office—was as slenderly elegant and extreme a gallant as one may hope to encounter between magazine covers. He had an indisputable air, a way with him, the eye of a killer; if he perhaps fancied himself a trace too fervently, something subtle in his bearing toward Mrs. Standish fostered the suspicion that he was almost fearfully sensible of the charms of that lady.

Miss Pride, on Mrs. Gosnold's other hand, was a wiry roan virgin who talked too much but seldom stupidly, exhibited a powerful virtuosity in strange gestures, and pointedly designated herself as a "spin" (diminutive for spinster) apparently deriving from this conceit an amusement esoteric to her audience. Similarly, she indulged a mettlesome fancy for referring to her hostess as "dear Abigail." Her own maiden name was eventually disclosed as Mercedes—pronounced, by request, Mar-say-daze.

From her alone Sally was conscious at the very outset of their acquaintance of a certain frigidity—as one may who approaches an open window in the winter unawares. And it was some time before she discovered that Miss Pride accounted her a rival, thanks to a cherished delusion, wholly of independent inspiration, that dear Abigail was a forlorn widow-woman in sore want of some thoroughly unselfish friend—somebody whose devotion could not possibly be thought mercenary—somebody very much like Mercedes Pride, Spin.

The table talk was so much concerned with the sensation of the hour, the burglary, that Sally grew quickly indifferent to the topic, and thus was able to appreciate Savage's mental dexterity in discussing it with apparent candour, but without once verging upon any statement or admission that might count against the interests of his sister. He seemed wholly unconstrained, but the truth was not in him. Or, if it were, it was in on a life sentence.

The consensus pronounced Mrs. Standish a very fortunate woman to be so thoroughly protected by insurance, and this the lucky victim indorsed with outspoken complacence, even to the extent of a semiserious admission that she almost hoped the police would fail to recover the plunder. For while many items of the stolen property, of course, were priceless, things not to be duplicated, things (with a pensive sigh) inexpressibly endeared to one through associations, she couldn't deny (more brightly again) it would be rather a lark to get all that money and go shopping to replenish her treasure-chests from the most famous jewellers of the three capitals.

This aspect of the case made Mrs. Artemas frankly envious. "How perfectly ripping!" she declared. "I'm almost tempted to hire a burglar of my own!"

"And then," Lyttleton observed profoundly, "if one isn't in too great a hurry—there's no telling—one may run across the lost things in odd corners and buy them back for a song or so. Anne Warridge did, when they looted her Southampton place, some time ago. Remember the year 'motor-car pirates' terrorized Long Island? Well, long after everything was settled and the insurance people had paid up, Anne unearthed several of her best pieces in the shops of bogus Parisian antiquaries, and bought them back at bargain rates."

"It sounds like a sin to me," Savage commented.

"But I call you all to witness that, if anything like that happens in this family, I hereby declare in on the profits. It's worth something, this trip to town—and nobody sorry to see me go!"

After luncheon the party dispersed without formality. Mrs. Artemas vanished bodily, Mrs. Standish in the car with her brother to see him off; Bob and Babs murmured incoherently about a boat, and disappeared forthwith; and Lyttleton, pleading overdue correspondence, Trego was snapped up for auction bridge by Mrs. Gosnold and Miss Pride, Sally being elected to fourth place as one whose defective education must be promptly remedied, lest the roof fall in.

She found it very pleasant, playing on a breeze-fanned veranda that overlooked the terrace and harbour, and proved a tolerably apt pupil. A very little practice evoked helpful memories of whist-lore that she had thought completely atrophied by long disuse, and she was aided besides by a strong infusion in her mentality of that mysterious faculty we call card-sense. Before the end of the second rubber she was playing a game that won the outspoken approval of Trego and Mrs. Gosnold, and certainly compared well with Miss Pride's, in spite of the undying infatuation for auction professed by dear Abigail's one true friend.

It was noteworthy that dear Abigail seemed to have no interests of any character that were not passionately indorsed by her faithful Mercedes.

Pondering this matter, Sally found time to wonder that Mercedes had not been deemed a sufficiently vigilant protector for the poor rich widow; it was her notion that Mercedes missed few bets.

A circumstance which Sally herself had overlooked turned out to be the tacit understanding on which the game had been made up; and when, at the conclusion of the third rubber, Mr. Trego summed up the score, then calmly presented her with a twenty-dollar bill and some loose silver—Mercedes with stoic countenance performing the same painful operation on her own purse in favour of dear Abigail—the girl was overcome with consternation.

"But—no!" she protested, and blushed. "We weren't playing for money, surely!"

"Of course we were!" Miss Pride snapped, with the more spirit since Sally's stupidity supplied an unexpected outlet. "I never could see the amusement in playing cards without a trifling stake—though I always do say five cents a point is too much for a friendly game."

"It's our custom," Mrs. Gosnold smiled serenely. "You haven't conscientious scruples about playing for money, I hope?"

"Oh, no; but"—Sally couldn't, simply couldn't confess her penniless condition before Miss Pride and Mr. Trego—"but I didn't understand."

"That's all right," Trego insisted. "You won it fairly, and it wasn't all beginners' luck, either. It was good playing; some of your inferences were as sound as any I ever noticed."

"It really doesn't seem right," Sally demurred.

None the less she could not well refuse the money.

"I must have my revenge!" Miss Pride announced briskly, that expression being sanctioned by convention. "To-night, dear Abigail? Or would you like another rubber now?"

Mrs. Gosnold shook her head and laughed. "No, thank you; I've had enough for one afternoon, and I'm sleepy besides." She thrust back her chair and rose. "If you haven't tried the view from the terrace, Miss Manwaring, I'm sure you'll find it worth while. And let your ill-gotten gains rest lightly on your conscience; put them in the war-chest against the rainy day that's sure to dawn for even the best players. I myself play a rather conservative game, you'll find, but there are times when for days on end I can't seem to get a hand much better than a yarborough."

"Do you," Sally faltered, timidly appreciating the impertinence, "do you lose very much?"

"I? No fear!" Mrs. Gosnold laughed again. "It amuses me to keep a bridge account, and there's seldom a year when it fails to show a credit balance of at least a thousand."

If Sally's bewilderment was only the deeper for this information, she was sensible enough to hold her tongue.

Why need Mrs. Standish deliberately have uttered so monumental a falsehood about the losses of her aunt at cards? She might, of course, be simply and sincerely mistaken, misled by over-solicitude for a well-beloved kinswoman.

On the other hand, the gesture of Adele Standish was not that of a woman easily deceived.

Thus the puzzle swung full circle.

"Mind if I show you the way, Miss Manwaring?"

"Oh, no!" Sally started from her abstraction to find Trego had lingered, and, smiling, turned to the steps that led down to the terrace. "I'll be very glad . . ."

But the truth was that she was not glad of this unsolicited company; she wanted uninterrupted opportunity to think things over; furthermore, she thought the sheer weight and masculine force of Trego's personality less ingratiating than another's—Savage's, for instance, however shallow, was all ways amusing—or Lyttleton's, with his flashing insouciant smile, his easy grace and utter repose of manner.

But this Mr. Trego, swinging ponderously by her side down the terrace walks, maintaining what was doubtless intended as a civil silence but what achieved only oppressiveness, of a sudden inspired a sharp impression that he would prove a man easy to dislike intensely—the sort of man who is capable of inspiring fear and makes enemies without any perceptible difficulty.

And if that were so—if, as it seemed, she had already, intuitively, acquired a distaste for Mr. Trego—how could she at once retain her self-respect and his money—money which she had won in defiance of the rules of fair play?

It stuck in her fist, a hard little wad of silver wrapped in the bill; nearly twenty-one dollars, the equivalent of three weeks' pay for drudgery, the winnings of an idle hour, the increment of false pretences.

"There's your view," Trego's voice broke upon the reverie. "Pretty fine, isn't it?"

They paused in a corner of the terrace, where a low stone wall, grey, weathered and lichened, fenced the brow of the cliff; and Sally's glance compassed a panorama of sea and sky and rocky headlands, with little appreciation of its wild, exquisite beauty.

She uttered an absent-minded "Yes," hesitated, plunged boldly: "Mr. Trego, I do wish you'd let me give back this money!"

His slowness in replying moved her to seek an answer in his face. He was unquestionably sifting his surprise for some excuse for her extraordinary request; a deep gravity informed his heavy-lidded eyes that were keen with an intelligence far more alert than she had previously credited.

He said deliberately: "Why?"

"I'd rather not say." She offered the money in her open hand. "But I'd feel—well, easier, if you'd take it back."

He clasped his hands behind him and shook his head. "Not without good reason. I don't understand, and what I don't understand I can't be party to."

She tried the effect of a wistful smile. "Please! I wish you wouldn't make me tell you."

"I wish you wouldn't put me in such an uncomfortable position. I don't like to refuse you anything you've set your heart on, but my notion of playing the game is to lose like a loser and—win like a winner."

"That's just it. I can't win like a winner because—because I didn't win fairly."

"You never cheated."

It was less a question than an assertion.

"How do you know?"

"I'd have known quick enough if you'd tried. Anyway, you're not that kind."

"How do you know I'm not?"

There was a pause. Then Trego smiled oddly. "Better not ask me. You don't know me very well yet."

She coloured faintly. "Then I must tell you you are wrong. I did cheat. I did, I tell you! I played for money without a cent to pay my losses if I lost. You don't call that fair play, do you?"

"Depends. Of course, it's hard to believe."

"I'm penniless. You don't understand my position here. I'm—nobody. Mrs. Standish took pity on me because I was out of work and brought me here to act as secretary to Mrs. Gosnold."

Trego nodded heavily. "I guessed it. I mean I felt pretty sure you were—well, of another world." He jerked a disrespectful head toward the smiling face of Gosnold House. "The same as me," he added. "That's why I thought . . . But it doesn't matter what I thought."

An unreasonable resentment held her true to the course of her purpose.

"Well, now you know, you must see it's impossible—"

"I don't," he contended stubbornly. "Maybe I'm the devil's advocate, but the way I see it—to begin with, I was playing for money; if I had won I'd have expected you to pay up."

"But I couldn't—"

"You would have; that is, Mrs. Gosnold would have paid for you. It was up to her. She meant it that way. She was staking you against the Pride person and myself; that's why you played together; if you and she had lost, she'd have paid for both. So, you see, you may as well quit trying to make me touch that money."

His sophistry baffled her. She shook her head, confused and a little angry in defeat, liking him less than ever.

"Very well. But I don't feel right about it—and I think it most unkind of you."

"Sorry. I only want to play the game as it lies, and this is my idea of doing it."

There was a brief pause while Sally, at a loss, stared out over the shining harbour, now more than ever sensible of the profound, peaceful beauty of its azure floor over which bright sails swung and swayed like slim, tall ladies treading a measure of some stately dance.

"If you ask my definition of unfair play," Trego volunteered, "it's this present attitude of yours—forcing a quarrel on me and getting mad because I stick up for my notion of a square deal!"

"Oh, you misunderstand!" she protested. "I'm only distressed by my conception of what's wrong."

"It's the worst of gambling," he complained: "always winds up in some sort of a row."

"Why gamble, then?"

"Why not? We've got to do something here to keep from yawning in one another's faces."

"Is there so much of it going on all the time—gambling—here?"

"Oh, not a great deal. Not bad gambling, at least." He smiled faintly. "Not what I call gambling. But I was bred on strong meat—in mining camps—where my father made his money. There men gambled with their lives. Here—hmp!" He grunted amusedly. "It's just enough like the real thing to make a fellow restless. Sometimes I wish the old man hadn't struck it quite so rich. If he hadn't, we'd both be happier. As it is, he fluffs around, making a pest of himself in Wall Street because he thinks it's the proper thing. And here am I, instead of earning dividends on what little knowledge I do happen to possess, sticking round with a set of idle egoists, simply because the old man's got his heart set on his son being in society! He won't be happy till he sees me married to one of these—er—women. Sometimes. . ."

Morosely he ruminated on the suppressed adjective for a moment. "Sometimes I feel it coming over me that the governor's liable to be happy, according to his lights, considerably quicker than I am."



CHAPTER VIII

A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

She sat beside the wide window of her bed-chamber, on that third midnight at Gosnold House, in a state of lawless exaltation not less physical than spiritual and mental, a temper that proscribed sleep hopelessly.

The window was open, the night air still and suave and warm, her sole protection a filmy negligee over a night-dress of sheerest silk and lace. And in that hour Sarah Manvers was as nearly a beautiful woman as ever she was to be—her face faintly flushed in the rich moonlight, faintly shadowed from within by the rich darkness of her blood, her dreaming eyes twin pools of limpid shadow, her dark lips shadowed by a slight elusive smile.

She was relishing the sensation of life intensely, almost painfully; she was intensely alive for the first time in all her life, it seemed; in throat and wrists and temples pulses sang, now soft, now loud; and all her body glowed, from crown of head to tips of toes nestling in silken mules, with the warmth and the languor of life.

She was deeply and desperately in love.

The genius of her curious destiny, not content with making her free of all the good material things of life, had granted her as well this last and dearest boon. For though her years were twenty-seven she had not loved before. She had dreamed of love, had been in love with love and with being loved, had believed she loved; but nothing in her experience compared with such rapture as to-night obsessed her being, wholly and without respite.

Life, indeed, grants no compensation for the ignominious necessity of love but this, that no other love was ever real but to-day's alone.

And so the beauty of that moonlight midnight seemed supernal. Becalmed, the island lay steeped in floods of ethereal silver, its sky an iridescent dome, its sea a shimmering shield of opalescence, its lawns and terraces argentine shadowed with deepest violet. There was never a definite sound, only the sibilance of a stillness made of many interwoven sounds, soft lisp of wavelets on the sands a hundred feet below, hum of nocturnal insect life in thickets and plantations, sobbing of a tiny, vagrant breeze lost and homeless in that vast serenity, wailing of a far violin, rumour of distant motor-cars. A night of potent witchery, a woman willingly bewitched. . . .

In fancy she still could feel the pulsing of his heart against her bosom, the caressing touch of his hands, the warm flutter of his breath in her hair and upon her cheek, as in that last dance; and with an inexpressible hunger at once of flesh and soul she yearned to feel them all again, to be once more within the magic circle of his arms, to live once more in the light of his countenance.

It mattered nothing that she loved hopelessly a graceless runagate—and knew it well. She had not needed the indirect warnings of Adele Standish and Mercedes Pride that the man was nothing better than an engaging scamp. Who was she to demand worthier object for her love? She was precisely Nobody, and might waste her passion as she would, and none but herself the worse for it.

Nor did it matter that her love was desperate of return. She knew that he recognised and was a little amused and a little flattered by her unspoken admiration, but more deeply than that affected not at all. But that was his imperial prerogative; she did not mind; temporarily she believed herself quite content, and that she would continue so as long as permitted to hug to her secret heart the unutterable sweetness of being in love with him. Again, she was Nobody and didn't count, while he was precisely all that she had longed for ever since she was of an age to dream of love. He was not only of an admirable person, he wore the habit of distinction like a garment made for him alone. In short, the man was irresistible, and the woman didn't even want to resist but only despaired of opportunity ever to capitulate.

She was as love-sick as a schoolgirl of sixteen; a hundred times, if once, her barely parted lips breathed his name to the sympathetic night that never would betray her: "Donald—Donald—Donald Lyttleton. . . ."

Now all the while she wasted sighing for him by the window Mr. Lyttleton spent idly speculating about her—lounging in a corner of the smoking-room, on the edge of a circle of other masculine guests making common excuse of alcohol to defer the tiresome formalities of going to bed and getting up again in the morning.

If this gentleman was Sally's junior in the matter of a year or two, he was overwhelmingly her senior in knowledge of his world—a world into which he had been brought neither to toil nor yet to spin, but simply to be the life and soul of the party. And at twenty-five he was beyond permitting sentiment to run away with judgment; he could resist temptation with as much fortitude as any man, always providing he could see any sound reason for resisting it—any reason, that is, promising a profit from the deed of abstinence.

Mr. Lyttleton had ten thousand a year of his own, income from a principal fortunately beyond his power to hypothecate; he spent twenty thousand with an easy conscience; he earnestly desired to be able to spend fifty without fear of consequences. Talents such as his merited maintenance—failing independent means, such maintenance as comes from marrying money and a wife above suspicion of parsimony. If only he had been able, or even had cared to behave himself, Mr. Lyttleton's fortunes might long since have been established on some such satisfactory basis. But he was sorely handicapped by the weakness of a sentimental nature; women would persist in falling in love with him—always, unhappily, women of moderate means. He couldn't help being sorry for them and seeking to assuage their sufferings; he couldn't forever be running away from some infatuate female; and so he was forever being found out and forgiven—by women. Most men, meanly envious, disliked him; all men held him in pardonable distrust. Devilish hard luck.

Take this Manwaring girl—pretty, intelligent, artless little woman, perhaps a bit mature, but fascinating all the same, affectingly naive about her trouble, which was simply spontaneous combustion, one more of those first-sight affairs. He had noticed the symptoms immediately, that night of her introduction to Gosnold House. He hadn't paid much attention to her during luncheon, and only sought her out—when they got up, on the spur of the moment, that informal after-dinner dance by moonlight on the veranda—partly because he happened to notice her sitting to one side, so obviously longing for him to ask her, partly because it was his business to dance, and partly because—well, because it was less dangerous, everything considered, than dancing with Mrs. Standish.

And then the eloquent treachery of Sally's eyes and that little gesture of surrender with which she yielded herself to his guidance. It was really too bad, he thought, especially since she had made occasion to tell him frankly she hadn't a dollar to bless herself with. Still, he must give himself credit for behaving admirably; he hadn't encouraged the girl. Not much, at all events. Of course, it wasn't in human nature to ignore her entirely after that; moreover, to slight her would have been conspicuous, not to say uncivil. But one must draw the line somewhere.

To-night, for example, he had danced with her perhaps too often for her own good, to say nothing of his own. And they had sat out a dance or two—awfully old-fashioned custom; went out years ago—still, one did it, regardless, now and then.

Curious girl, the Manwaring; one moment almost melting into his arms, the next practically warning him against herself. And curiously reticent—said she was "Nobody"—let it go at that. Very probably told the truth; she seemed to know nobody who was anybody; and though she was apparently very much at her ease most of the time, and not readily impressed, he noticed now and then a little tensity in her manner, a covert watchfulness of other women, as though she were waiting for her cue.

At this juncture in his reverie Mr. Lyttleton peremptorily dismissed luckless Miss Manwaring from his mind, compounded his nightcap at the buffet, and joined in the general conversation.

Coincidentally the reverie of Miss Manwaring at her bedchamber window digressed to review fragmentarily the traffic and discoveries of three wonderful days.

Days in whose glamorous radiance the romance of Cinderella paled to the complexion of a sordidly realistic narrative of commonplaces; contemplating them, Sally, for the sake of her self-conceit, felt constrained to adopt an aloof, superior, sceptical pose. Conceding freely the incredible reality of this phase of her history, she none the less contended that in it no more true permanence inhered than in a dream.

She recapitulated many indisputable signs of the instability of her affairs. And of all those the foremost, the most glaring, was her personal success, at once actual and impossible. She saw herself (from that remote and weather-beaten coign of scepticism) moving freely to and fro in the great world of the socially elect, unhindered, unquestioned, tacitly accepted, meeting, chatting, treating and parting with its denizens with a gesture of confidence that was never the gesture of S. Manvers of the Hardware Notions; a Nobody on terms of equality with indisputable Somebodies—vastly important Somebodies indeed, for the most part; so much so that by common consent mankind had created for them a special world within the world and set it apart for their exclusive shelter and delectation, for them to live in and have their being untroubled and uncontaminated by contact with the commonalty.

For all that, Sally couldn't see why they must be so cared for and catered to. The only thing that apparently distinguished them from those who lacked their advantages, who looked up reverently to them and read enviously of their doings in the papers, was their assurance, a quality ostensibly inimitable; yet she imitated it with seemingly flawless art. A contradiction that defied her wits to reconcile.

She wasted time in the endeavour; her own personality was prepossessing; she had sufficient tact never to seek to ingratiate herself; her solecisms were few and insignificant, and the introduction of Abigail Gosnold was an unimpeachable credential.

As for her antecedents, the lie which credited her to the city of Massillon passed unchallenged, while a conspiracy of silence kept private to the few acquainted with it that hideous secret of her department-store servitude. Mrs. Gosnold would have said nothing out of sheer kindness of heart even if it had not been her settled habit to practise the difficult arts of minding her own business and keeping her own counsel. Savage was still in New York, but had he been at Gosnold House would have imitated the example set by his amiable sister and held his tongue even when most exasperated with Sally. Mr. Trego, of course, knew no more than what he had been free to surmise from the girl's impulsive confession that she had been out of both work and money when befriended by Mrs. Standish; but, whatever his inferences, he kept them to himself.

A simple, sincere, stubborn soul, this Mr. Trego; so, at least, he made himself appear to Sally, persistently seeking her and dumbly offering a friendship which she, in the preoccupation of her grand passion, had neither time nor wish to cultivate, and which he himself ingenuously apologised for on the plea of self-defence. He frankly professed a mortal dread of "these women," one of whom, he averred mysteriously, was bent on marrying him by main strength and good-will first time she caught him with lowered guard.

His misgivings were measurably corroborated by the attitude toward Sally adopted by Mrs. Standish in her capacity as close friend, foil, and confidant of Mrs. Artemas. In the course of those three days the girl had not been insensible to intimations of a strong, if as yet restrained, animus in the mind of the older woman. In alarm and regret she did her futile best to discourage this gentleman without being overtly discourteous. She could hardly do more; impossible to explain to her benefactress that he was not the man of her heart's choice.

Unfortunately, Trego was indifferent to tempered rebuffs.

"If you don't mind," he interrupted one of Sally's protracted snubs, "I'll just stick around and keep on enjoying the society of a human being. Of course, I know these others are all human in their way, but it isn't your way or mine. Perhaps it only seems so to me because I don't understand 'em. It's quite possible. One thing's sure, they don't understand me. At least, the women don't; I can get along with the men—most of 'em. They're not a bad lot, if immature. You can stand a lot of foolishness from children once you realise their grown-uppishness is only make-believe."

"They don't know how to enjoy themselves," he expatiated; "they've got too much of everything, including spare time. What's a holiday to anybody who has never done a stroke of work? You and I know the difference; we can appreciate the fun of loafing between spells of work; but these people have got no standards to measure their fun by, so it's all the same to them—flat, vapid, monotonous, unless they season it up with cocktails and carrying on; and even that gets to have all the same flavour of tastelessness after a while. That's why so many of these women are going in for the suffragette business; it isn't that they care a whoop for the vote; it's because they want the excitement of wanting something they haven't got and can't get by signing a check for it."

"You're prejudiced," the girl objected. "You're at loose-ends yourself, idle and restless, and it distorts your mental vision. For my part, I've never met more charming people—"

"That's your astigmatism," he contended. "You've been wanting this society thing all your life, and now you've got it you're as pleased as a child with a new toy. Wait till the paint wears off and it won't shut its eyes when you put it down on its back and sawdust begins to leak out at the joints."

"Wouldn't it be more kind of you to leave me to discover the sawdust for myself?"

"It unquestionably would, and I ought to be kicked," Trego agreed heartily. "I only started this in fun, anyway, to make you see why it is you look so good to me—different—so sound and sane and wholesome that I just naturally can't help pestering you."

She did not know what to say to that. She suffered him. . . .

Her duties as secretary to Mrs. Gosnold proved, when inaugurated the second morning after her arrival, to be at once light and interesting. Her employer was conservative enough in an unmannerly age to insist on answering all personal correspondence with her own hand; what passed between her and her few intimates was known to herself alone. But she carried on, in addition, an animated correspondence with numberless frauds—antique dealers, charities, professional poor relations, social workers, and others of that ilk—which proved tremendously diverting to her amanuensis, especially when it transpired that Mrs. Gosnold had a mind and temper of her own, together with a vocabulary amply adequate to her powers of ironic observation. This last gift came out strongly in her diary, a daily record of her various interests and activities which she dictated, interspersing dry details with many an acid annotation.

When all was finished Sally found she had been busied for little more than two hours, and was given to understand that her duties would be made more burdensome only by the addition of a little light bookkeeping when she settled down to the routine of regular employment.

Of the alleged high play, at cards or otherwise, she had yet, at this third midnight, to see any real evidence. Mrs. Gosnold most undoubtedly played a stiff game of bridge, but she played it with a masterly facility, the outcome of long practice and profound study; her losses, when she lost, were minimised. Nor was there ever a sign of cheating that came under Sally's observation. Everybody played who didn't dance, and vice versa, but nobody seemed to play for the mere sake of winning money. And while the influx of week-end guests by the Friday evening boat brought the number at Gosnold House up to twenty-two, they were all apparently amiable, self-centred folk of long and intimate acquaintance with one another as well as with their hostess and all her neighbours on the Island. Of that dubious crew of adventurers she had been led to expect there was never a hint.

Such provision as their hostess made for her guests' entertainment and amusement they patronised or ignored with equal nonchalance, according to individual whim; they commanded breakfasts for all hours of the morning, and they lunched at home and dined abroad, or reversed the order, or sought all their meals in the homes of neighbouring friends, quite without notice or apology. Such was the modish manner of that summer of 1915—a sedulous avoidance of anything resembling acknowledgment of obligation to those who entertained. Indeed, if one interpreted their attitude at its face value, the shoe was on the other foot.

And they brimmed the alleged hollowness of their days with an extraordinary amount of running about. There was incessant shifting of interest from one focal point to another of the colony, a perpetually restless swarming hither and yon to some new centre of distraction, a continual kaleidoscopic parade of the most wonderful and extravagant clothing the world has ever seen.

To the outsider, of course, all this was not merely entertaining and novel, if much as she had imagined it would be, it was more—it was fascination, it was enchantment, it was the joy of living made manifest, it was life.

If only this bubble might not burst!

Of course, it must; even if not too good to be true, it was too wonderful to be enduring; the clock strikes twelve for every Cinderella, and few are blessed enough to be able to leave behind them a matchless slipper.

But whatever happened, nothing now could prevent her carrying to her grave the memory of this one glorious flight: "better to have loved and lost—" The wraith of an old refrain troubled Sally's reverie. How did it go? "Now die the dream—"

Saturate with exquisite melancholy, she leaned out over the window-sill into the warm, still moonlight, drinking deep of the wine-scent of roses, dwelling upon the image of him whom she loved so madly.

What were the words again?

". . . The past is not in vain, For wholly as it was your life, Can never be again, my dear, Can never be again."

She shook a mournful head, sadly envisaging the loveliness of the world through a mist of facile tears; that was too exquisitely, too poignantly true of her own plight; for, wholly as it was, her life could never be again.

And not for worlds would she have had it otherwise.

Below, in the deserted drawing-room, a time-mellowed clock chimed sonorously the hour of two.

Two o'clock of a Sunday morning, and all well; long since Gosnold House had lapsed into decent silence; an hour ago she had heard the last laggard footsteps, the last murmured good nights in the corridor outside her door as the men-folk took themselves reluctantly off to their beds.

She leaned still farther out over the sill, peering along the gleaming white facade; no window showed a light that she could see. She listened acutely; not a sound but the muttering of fretful little waves and the drowsy complaint of some bird troubled in its sleep.

Of all that heedless human company, it seemed, she alone remained awake.

Something in that circumstance proved almost resistlessly provocative to her innate lust for adventure. For upward of two hours she had been passive there in her chair, a prey to uneasy thoughts; now she was weary with much thinking, but as far as ever from the wish to sleep; never, indeed, more wide awake—possessed by a demon of restlessness, consumed with desire to rise up and go out into the scented moonstruck night and lose herself in its loneliness and—see what she should see.

Why not? No one need ever know. A staircase at her end of the corridor—little used except by servants—led to a small door opening directly upon the terrace. Providing it were not locked and the key removed, there was no earthly reason why, if so minded, she should not go quietly forth that way and drink her fill of the night's loveliness.

To a humour supple to such temptation the tang of lawlessness in a project innocent enough was irresistible. Besides, what was the harm? What could be the objection, even were the escapade to be discovered by misadventure?

Among other items in her collection of borrowed plumage she possessed an evening wrap, somewhat out of fashion, but eminently adapted to her purpose—long enough to cloak her figure to the ground, thus eliminating all necessity for dressing against chance encounter with some other uneasy soul. Worn with black stockings and slippers, it would render her almost invisible in shadow.

In another minute, without turning on a light, she had found and donned those several articles, and from her door was narrowly inspecting the hallway before venturing a step across the threshold.

It was quite empty and silent, its darkness moderated only by the single nightlight burning at the head of the main staircase.

Satisfied, she closed the door and crept noiselessly down the steps, to find the side door not even locked.

Leaving it barely ajar, she stepped out beneath the stars, hesitated for a moment of cautious reconnaissance, then darted across an open space of moonlight as swiftly as the shadow of a cloud wind-sped athwart the moon, and so gained the sheltering shadow of the high hedge between the formal garden and tennis-court.

The dew-drenched turf that bordered the paths muffled her footsteps as effectually as could be wished, and keeping circumspectly in shadow, the better to escape observation from any of the windows, she gained at length that corner of the terrace overlooking the water where she and Trego had paused for their first talk.

Nothing now prevented her from appreciating the view to the full. Enchanted, she withdrew a little way from the brow of the cliff to a seat on the stone wall, overshadowed by the hedge, and for a long time sat there motionless, content.

Below her the harbour lay steel-grey and still within its guardian headlands, a hundred slim, white pleasure craft riding its silent tide. Far out a Sound steamer crawled like some amphibious glowworm, its triple tier of deck-lights almost blended into one. Farther still the lights of the mainland glimmered low upon the horizon. .

At a little distance, from a point invisible, an incautious footstep grated upon a gravel path of the terrace and was instantly hushed.

But the girl, stiffened to rigidity in her place, fancied she could hear the whisper of grass beneath stealthy feet.

Abruptly a man came out into broad moonlight and, pausing on a stone platform at the edge of the cliff by the head of the long, steep, wooden zigzag of stairs to the sands, looked back toward the house.

Sally held her breath. But her heart was like a mad thing—the man was Donald Lyttleton. He still wore evening dress, but had exchanged the formal coat for that hybrid garment which Sally had lately learned should not be termed a Tuxedo. The brim of a soft, dark hat masked his eyes. He carried one shoulder stiffly, as if holding something in the hollow of his arm. She could not make out or imagine what this might be.

His hesitation was brief. Satisfied, he swung round to the stairway, in another instant had vanished. Only light footfalls on the wooden steps told of a steady descent, and at the same time furnished assurance that Sally had not victimised herself with a waking vision bred of her infatuation.

The footfalls, not loud at best, had become inaudible before she found courage to approach the platform. With infinite pains to avoid a sound, she peered over the edge of its stone parapet.

For a little the gulf swam giddily beneath her who was never quite easy at any unusual height. But she set herself with determination to master this weakness and presently was able to examine the beach with a clear vision.

It was only partially shadowed by the cliffs, but that shadow was dense, and outside it nothing stirred. None the less, after a time she was able to discern Lyttleton's figure kneeling on the sands at the immediate foot of the cliff, a hundred feet or so to one side of the steps. And while she watched he rose, stood for a little staring out to sea, wasted a number of matches lighting a cigarette (which seemed curious, in view of the unbroken calm) and moved on out of sight beyond a shoulder of stone.

She waited fully ten minutes; but he did not reappear.

Then, retreating to her seat on the stone wall, she waited as long again—still no sign of Lyttleton.

But something else marked that second period of waiting that intrigued her no less than the mysterious actions of her beloved—this although she could imagine no link between the two.

Some freak of chance drew her attention to a small, dark shape, with one staring red eye, that was stealing quietly across the Sound in the middle distance—of indefinite contour against the darkening waters, but undoubtedly a motor-boat, since there was no wind to drive any sailing vessel at its pace, or indeed at any pace at all.

While she watched it incuriously it came to a dead pause, and so remained for several minutes. Then, deliberately, with infinitely sardonic effect, it winked its single eye of red at her—winked portentously three times.

She made nothing of that, and in her profound ignorance of all things nautical might have considered it some curious bit of sea etiquette had she not, the next instant, caught out of the corner of her eye the sudden glow of a window lighted in the second story of Gosnold House.

As she turned in surprise the light went out. A pause of perhaps twenty seconds ensued. Then the window shone out again—one in the left wing, the wing at the end of which her bedchamber was located. But when she essayed to reckon the rooms between it and her own it turned black again, and after another twenty seconds once more shone out and once more was lightless.

After this it continued stubbornly dark, and by the time Sally gave up trying to determine precisely which window it had been, and turned her gaze seaward again, the boat had vanished. Its lights, at least, were no longer visible, and it was many minutes before the girl succeeded in locating the blur it made on the face of the waters. It seemed to be moving, but the distance was so great that she could not be sure which way.

A signal—yes, obviously; but between whom and for what purpose?

Who was on that boat? And who the tenant of that room of the flashing window? She was satisfied that the latter was one of a row of six windows to three rooms occupied by Mrs. Standish, Mrs. Artemas, and a pretty young widow who had arrived late Saturday afternoon and whose name Sally had yet to learn.

She pondered it all with ever-deepening perplexity until a change came over the night—a wind stirred, leaves rattled, boughs soughed plaintively, the waters wakened and filled the void of silence with soft clashing. Then, shivering, Sally rose and crept back toward the house.

But when she paused on the edge of the last shadow, preparatory to the dash across the moonlit space to the door, a step sounded beside her, a hand caught at her cloak.

She started back with a stifled cry.

"Steady!" Lyttleton's voice counselled her guardedly. "Don't make a row! Blessed if it ain't Miss Manwaring!"



CHAPTER IX

PICAROON

Plucking peremptorily at her cloak, Lyttleton drew the girl to him and, seizing her hand, without further ceremony dragged her round the clump of shrubbery to a spot secure from observation.