Chapter I

"No; no house-parties till the middle of July. Dear knows, what with a string of big dinners, my two little dances, and those tiresome Thursdays in January and February when everybody came, I have done all that could be expected by society from paupers like ourselves," said Mrs. Henry Gervase, settling herself in a wicker chair, on the veranda of her country home, and looking approvingly at her water-view.

"Paupers!" said a lady from a neighboring cottage, who had dropped in to call. Mrs. Gervase's friends rarely liked to commit themselves to positive comment upon her statements until certain which way the cat was meant to jump. Mrs. Luther Prettyman, the wife of the dry-goods magnate, whose good fortune it was to own the land adjoining the Gervase property at Sheepshead Point,—a recently famous resort for summer visitors on our far eastern coast,—now contented herself with a little deprecatory giggle that might mean anything, and waited for Mrs. Gervase to go on.

"Oh, well! everything is comparative; and on the scale by which people measure things in New York, to-day, we are simply grovelling in poverty. John,"—to her gardener,—"you have got that row of myosotis entirely out of line; and, remember, nothing but salvia behind the heliotropes. I like a blaze of scarlet and purple against a blue sea-line like this. Heavens! what a perfect afternoon! The atmosphere has been clarified, and those birches in the ravine 'twinkle with a million lights.' My dear woman, I make no apologies. Any one who wants me at this season of the year must take me as I am. After eight months of bricks and mortar, dirty streets, and stupid drives in the Park, I am fairly maudlin over Nature when I get her back in June.

"I went to a concert where Paderewski played a night or two before he left America; and I give you my word that while the music was going on I put up my fan and plainly heard the babble of this little brook of mine, and the lap of the waves over the rocks at high tide, with, now and then, the notes of the song-sparrow that comes back every year and perches on my Norway pine. Somebody said of me afterwards, at supper, that I had been having a little nap. They may say anything of me, I believe, and some idiot will be found to credit it. But please don't accept the newspaper report that I am to have Mr. and Mrs. This, or Mr. That and Mrs. T'other, stopping with me at Stoneacres during June. I am much too busy with my granger-work, and my husband too industrious doing nothing, to play host and hostess now."

"I did not know; I only thought—" ventured Mrs. Prettyman. "You see, everything is so dull here, socially, till August. And when one has a guest coming who is accustomed to a great deal of fashionable gaiety,—a young lady, a distinguished belle,—one naturally grasps at the idea of such pleasant house-parties as yours are known to be, dear Mrs. Gervase."

"We shall be dull as ditch-water," answered relentless Mrs. Gervase, turning around to survey the struggle of a fat-breasted robin to extract from the turf a worm that continued to emerge in apparently unending length. "And if you will have a girl out of season, why, put her on bread and milk and beauty-sleep, give her plenty of trashy novels and a horse to ride, and she'll do well enough."

"But—perhaps I am wrong—surely Mr. Gervase told Mr. Prettyman, when they were smoking on our veranda last Sunday, that you are expecting your nephew, Mr. Alan Grove."

"That's just like Mr. Gervase,—a perfect sieve for secrets," quoth Mrs. Gervase, contemptuously; "when I particularly requested him to mention Alan's visit to nobody. The poor boy is completely used up with work, and has engaged to get a paper ready to read before some scientific congress next month, and finds himself unable to write a line of it in town. Here, I have promised him, he may have absolute quiet—not be called on to play civility or squire-of-dames for any one; and, I may as well warn you now, he's not to be expected to do a hand's turn of entertainment for your girl. Besides, I happen to know that he can't abide 'society' young women. He is plunged up to the neck in electricity, is poor, ambitious, clever, on the way to sure success; and I'm going to back him all I can, not put stumbling-blocks in his path."

"How plunged up to his neck in electricity?" asked puzzled Mrs. Prettyman.

"Electric law, my good soul; did you think it a new kind of capital punishment? The lucrative law of the future, I've heard wise men say. Simpkins!" hailing, with irresistible command, a butcher's cart that seemed possessed of a strong desire to drive away in a hurry from a side entrance to the house. "Simpkins! Oh! there you are; I meant to leave orders with the cook not to let you get away again to-day without a word from me. I noticed, on the book, that you had the effrontery to charge sixty cents a pound for spring chickens here in June. Now, don't tell me! The way all you natives do; you have a short season, and must make the most of it. This is not your season, or my season, either. Wait till August before you put on the screws. And your sweetbreads, eighty cents a pair, when you know that when Mr. Gervase and I first came here to live, you were throwing sweetbreads away, till we taught you the use of them! Now, mind, I shall get tired of sending friends to you to be fleeced in August, if this is what you do to me in June."

"I must be running off," said Mrs. Prettyman, arising from her spot of shade and luxurious comfort in the deep veranda filled, though not encumbered, with picturesque belongings, with stands and pots of blooming plants in every nook. "I'll declare, nobody's flowers do as well as yours. And the wages we pay our head gardener! It makes me really envious."

This, be it known, was a clever stroke on the part of neighbor Prettyman. Secretly resentful of the tepid interest in the personality of her expected guest,—who, in the eyes of the house of Prettyman, was an event,—she yet did not dare attempt to bring the greater lady to yield sympathy upon the spot. Mrs. Gervase's weakest side was for her flowers. She possessed the magic touch that alone nurtures them to perfection, and with it the proud love of a parent for children that grow inclined according to her will.

"Hum! We do pretty well, considering this house is built on the ragged edge of nothing over the sea, and is swept by all the winds of heaven, in turn, and sometimes all together. And, in a climate where one goes to bed in the Tropics and wakes up at the North Pole, what would you have? John, there, though I'll not set him up by telling him so, has learned all I know about flowers, and picks up new ideas every day. By August, now, these beds and stands will be worth looking at. What did you say is the name of the young person who's coming to stop with you? If you've nothing better, suppose you and she and Mr. Prettyman come over to dinner Saturday. Alan has promised me not to work at night, and by that time my plants will all be in the ground and my mind at rest."

"Thank you so much," said the lesser luminary. "It is always a treat to dine with you en famille; and it is—didn't I mention her?—Gladys Eliot who is coming to us to-morrow."

"Gladys Eliot! Why, she's gone with her people to London for two months. I saw her name in the Teutonic's list last Thursday. Those Eliots would never in the world let slip another chance for her to make the great match they've set out to get."

"Nevertheless," said Mrs. Prettyman, with some show of spirit, "Mrs. Eliot, who is my old school-friend, wrote me, the day before they sailed, that Gladys had taken it into her head to stay behind, and begged me to keep her till her aunt can come up from Baltimore in July and take the girl in charge."

"Three weeks of Gladys Eliot!" remarked Mrs. Gervase. "My poor woman, I pity you. By the end of the month there will be no health in you. A professional beauty, who has run the gauntlet of four or five years of incessant praises, has been advertised like 'Pear's Soap,' in England and America, and has failed to make her coup! I remember what Alan Grove said about her no longer ago than Christmas of last year: 'I haven't the advantage of Miss Eliot's acquaintance, but her and her kind I hold in abhorrence,—denationalized Americans; hangers-on of older civilizations that make a puppet-show of them; spoiled for home, with no rightful place abroad; restless, craving what no healthy-minded husband of their own kind can give them.' Bless me—and those two are going to meet here!"

"I think Mr. Alan Grove need not concern himself," said Mrs. Prettyman, driven to bay. "Mrs. Eliot mentioned in her letter that Gladys—it is no secret, evidently—is nearly, if not quite, engaged to marry some one the family feels is in all respects all they could have hoped for her."

"Then it must be either that Colonel Larkyns, the very rude man with large feet, who walked all over my velvet gown at the Egertons', last winter,—came over with Lord Glenmore, whom the Eliots tried for and couldn't get,—or else McLaughlin, the Irishman who made such a lot of money in Montana. The two men were running evenly, 'twas said. Let me think—didn't I see her at Claremont on McLaughlin's coach, last month? Pray, my dear, are we to congratulate you on having Mr. McLaughlin, also, as a member of your household, before long?"

"Oh dear, dear!" continued the plain-spoken lady to herself, when poor Mrs. Prettyman, fairly routed, had retired without honors from the field. "Why is nature so heavenly kind to us in American places of resort, and 'only man is vile'? Why does this struggle for place, this pride of vogue, these types of our worst social element—I hate that word 'social,' it sounds vulgar; but what else expresses this for me?—follow one into this earthly Paradise? Here I have got myself into a pretty kettle of fish with Alan Grove. He will be bored to death and his visit broken up, for we can't rid ourselves of people who sit in our pocket, like the Prettymans in summer; and he will be running upon this Eliot creature perpetually. If Henry would help me, we might—but he is so abominably friendly and cordial with country neighbors, there's no hope from him. Besides, if a girl is pretty, it makes no earthly difference to my good man whether she is a fiend of calculation and cold-heartedness. I declare, I've no patience with Henry, anyhow."

So saying, Mrs. Gervase went out to drive with the offender in question, behind a pair of sleek cobs, in a little buckboard of tawny wood with russet leather cushions and harness,—his latest present,—and soon, in cheerful companionship, forgot all sorrows amid such views of land and water as Sheepshead Point people think only Sheepshead Point can offer.

Chapter II

To reach Sheepshead Point, a boat steams daily, and several times a day, from a station on the line of a great railway skirting the eastern Atlantic coast. Issuing from a drawing-room car there, a young woman, dressed in a tight-fitting skirt and jacket of sailor blue, with a loose shirt of red silk belted around a taper waist, her small head with its sailor-hat half shrouded from view in a blue tissue veil, walked lightly ahead of Mr. Alan Grove and, attended by an elderly maid, went far forward to stand in the bows of the boat.

Grove, struck by the grace and distinction of her carriage, looked again, and then was conscious of an actual fierce jump of the heart.

"Can there be two of them?" he asked of his inner man. "Doctors tell you if you keep your body in good order, and your mind healthily at work, you will never see a ghost—and yet—that's the double of the woman who sailed away from me last Thursday; who's haunted me during the six madly misspent weeks since I had the misfortune to be told off to take her in to dinner. Oh! no, it isn't. Yes, it is—by Jove, it is Gladys Eliot."

He was never so astonished. Believing her to be at that moment on the ocean, nearing British shores, Grove was fairly staggered when Miss Eliot, turning, espied him and, by a graciously easy nod, summoned him to her side. Considering the manner of their parting a few weeks back, he wondered at himself for the immediate abjectness of his obedience.

It was a favorite phrase of Gladys Eliot's admirers to describe her as having a "Duchess of Leinster head and throat." Nature had certainly bestowed upon this daughter of nobody in particular in the Western Hemisphere a pose of a proud little head upon broad, sloping shoulders, as fine as that much-photographed great lady's. She had, in addition, a pair of innocent, Irish-blue eyes and a guileless smile; a voice, in speaking, that was sweet and low; and the best or worst manners in the world, so critics said, according to the desirableness of her interlocutor.

"Mr. Grove! How perfectly extraordinary that you should be here," she exclaimed, giving him the tips of her well-gloved fingers, while the maid and dressing-bag withdrew discreetly into the background.

"Did you expect me to remain forever on the steps of the Claremont tea-house, like a monument of a city father, to adorn the suburbs of New York?"

"You are so quick-tempered, so unreasonable! How should I know you were going to take such dire offence? But please—I can't quarrel away off here, or even justify myself. If you are going to remain furious with me, at least gratify my curiosity first, and tell me how you came on this boat, and where you are going. Then, if you are so inclined, you may retire into your shell and sulk."

A soft light was shining in her eye. Her voice was pleading; her face, most beautiful. Grove, promising himself, in street vernacular, to "go off and kick himself" directly afterwards, took his place at her elbow and gazed down hungrily upon her artless, changeful countenance.

"Rather tell me why you are not about to plant your triumphant banner on British shores once more. I read your name in the list of those sailing. The newspapers have given all of your summer plans in detail, all the country-houses that are to receive you, all the aristocrats that are to send invitations to dinner, to meet your ship at Queenstown."

She colored slightly. "As usual, you are making fun of me. What would be the use, since you won't believe me, of telling you my actual reason for backing out of this English visit, and letting my mother and sister go without me? No, I shan't flatter you by showing my real self."

"I have seen enough of your real self, thank you. I believe I prefer the unreal, the imaginary woman I suffered myself to fancy you to be for a brief space after our acquaintance began."

"Now you are rude," she began, her voice faltering ever so little, but enough to shake his equilibrium. He made a movement towards her; and she looked him in the face, trying to keep down the tingle of satisfaction in her veins. For Gladys's experience of men had taught her to recognize in a certain phase of incivility the existence of passion unsubdued. It is only indifference in his sex that can maintain an armor of polite self-control towards hers.

Grove caught the transient gleam in her eye, and read it aright. Immediately he was on the defensive, and his manner froze.

"I believe you know my aunt, Mrs. Gervase, in town," he said. "I think I saw you at one of her dances, in January."

"Mrs. Gervase is the dearest thing," interrupted Miss Eliot, conscious of blankness in her tone.

"She may be, but it would be a brave person who would tell her so. She is a delightful, but autocratic, personage; and one of the treats of the year for me is to get away to her and my uncle for a holiday, when they have no one else. This is one of those rare occasions. The cottage people who have come down to Sheepshead have a tacit agreement to keep to themselves, just now. They are supposed to be getting their houses to rights, and making gardens, and what not. Mrs. Gervase says they are really wearing out the past season's gloves, and putting tonics on their hair, and trying new cures and doses, for which there was no time before leaving town. The days will pass in doing as we please, and in the evening we shall dine well (for the Gervases have a corker of a cook), after which my aunt and uncle and I will take each a book and a lamp into some nook of the library, and read till bedtime. You can't imagine a life more to my taste."

"Prohibitory to outsiders, at least," said Gladys. "This is, as I suppose you mean it to be, awfully alarming to me; for I haven't told you that I am for three weeks to be Mrs. Gervase's nearest neighbor. I am going to visit an old friend of my mother's,—Mrs. Luther Prettyman."

Grove experienced a sensation of dismay. The Prettymans! ChÂteau Calicot, as he had dubbed their new florid "villa," built on the shore in objectionable proximity to his uncle's house, some three years back! He remembered the vines planted, the shrubs set out, the rattan screens hung, the final adjustment of chairs by Mrs. Gervase, in the attempt to shut out every glimpse of the Prettyman belongings from their place of daily rendezvous on the veranda at Stoneacres; his uncle's sly amusement when the cupola of the Prettyman stables, and the roof of a detestable little sugar-temple tea-house were projected on their line of vision, spite of all. Mrs. Gervase could not forgive herself for not having secured that point of land when land was so ridiculously cheap. On an average of once a day, she reminded her husband that she had begged him to do so, and he had put it off until too late.

Mrs. Prettyman, unvisited by Mrs. Gervase for many months after the red-brown gables of her costly dwelling rose into prominence at Sheepshead Point, had gradually found her way into quasi-intimacy at Stoneacres. Mrs. Gervase, protesting that her neighbor was commonplace, vacuous, a being from whom one could derive nothing more profitable than the address of a place in town to have one's lace lampshades made a dollar cheaper than elsewhere, allowed herself, in time, to take a mild but perceptible interest in Prettyman affairs. Through force of habit, she had grown accustomed to survey the Prettyman lodge-gates, in driving, without remarking upon "the absurdity of gilded finials to iron railings, at a rough, seaside place like this." Nay, the noses of the Gervase cobs were now not infrequently turned in through these gilded railings. Mr. and Mrs. Gervase dined periodically with the Prettymans. The Prettymans repaired more frequently to Stoneacres. Mrs. Prettyman made capital, in town, of her friendship with "dear Mrs. Gervase." This, Grove, like the rest of the world, had come gradually to know and accept. But it grated on him to hear that the woman who, so far, had furnished his life its chief feminine influence should be associated in this way with the mistress of ChÂteau Calicot. It belittled his one passion—now put away as dead, but still his own. This, indeed, set the crowning touch upon his misfortune of meeting her again.

Chapter III

"My dear boy, you might have knocked me down with a feather," said Mrs. Gervase, upon capturing her nephew at the wharf and driving away with him. "Tell me at once what you mean by knowing Gladys Eliot, and arriving with her in that intimate sort of way, just as I had, with infinite trouble, succeeded in bluffing the Prettymans with a mere dinner on Saturday! Now you will be having to call. You, of all people, hitting it off with Gladys Eliot!"

"Give yourself no concern," put in Mr. Gervase, who was driving, looking back over his shoulder with a beaming smile; "I offer to throw myself into the breach. A woman as beautiful, as tall, as placid, as Miss Eliot commands the best homage of my heart. I forewarn you that I am going desperately into this affair. Such luck never came my way before."

"Stop at the confectioner's for the macaroons, Henry," said his wife, ignoring transports. "Alan, you are looking wretched. When I think of those ruddy, brown cheeks, and the look of vigor you brought out of your college athletics a few years back, I'm inclined to renounce mind and go in for muscle exclusively. Oh, that wretched grind of life in New York that crushes the youth and spirit out of you poor boys that have to toil for a living! Surely, it isn't only law that's worked such havoc in those pale, thin cheeks—"

"My dear Agatha, your sympathy would put a well man in his bed," said Mr. Gervase, whose keen eyes took in more of the actual situation than did his wife's.

"Oh well!—stop here, please; no, I won't get down, Jonas sees me; he will be out directly, with the parcel—you must see, Henry, that Alan has changed, even since—"

"Alan, let me tell you of a bill our friend Jonas, here, who is a bit of a horse-jockey, as well as local confectioner and pastry-cook, sent in recently to your aunt. He had been selling her a mate to her chestnut, and the account ran this way:

"'Mrs. H. GERVASE to I. JONAS, Dr.

Grove was glad to cover his various discomforts with a laugh. But he did not find it easy to elude the vigilance of Mrs. Gervase, who bided her time until an opportunity presented itself for an uninterrupted talk with him.

"Stretch yourself out on that bamboo couch, and let me put the pillows in," she said, when they two adjourned to the veranda, in the twilight after dinner. "It is such fun to have a boy to cosset once more, with my own lads at college, and three weeks to wait before I can get Tom and Louis back from New London after the boat-race."

"You have such an inspired faculty for making men comfortable," Grove remarked, from the depths of his bien-Être.

"Custom, I suppose. An only daughter, with a father and three brothers to wait upon till I married, and a husband and two sons to impose on me since. I should not know how to handle girls. I like them, of course,—find them all very well in their way,—but they bother me. Perhaps it is that there are no old-fashioned girls any more—no young ones, certainly. They come into the world like Minerva from Jove's brain. They are so learned, or clever, or worldly-wise, read everything, see everything, hear everything discussed, have no illusions—but, there, I can't explain my preference. Men are captious, obstinate, whimsical, by turns; disappoint one continually in little things—but in the main they are so broad and big; scatter nonsense into thin air; are so loyal and unswerving to their beliefs; know where they stand, and, having made up their minds to action, do not change."

"In short," remarked Grove, "you are like the little servant-maid in Cranford, when they told her to hand the potatoes to the ladies first. 'I'll do as you bid me, ma'am, but I like the lads best.' My dearest auntie, there must be guardian angels specially appointed to look after our sex, and you are one of them. This is the age and America is the field for the unchecked efflorescence of young womankind. But when the conversation takes on this complexion, I feel it to be unfair not to allow the defendant the assistance of counsel; though, even if Uncle Henry were here, I am sure we should both be demolished speedily."

"Never mind Henry," said that gentleman's representative. "He has got a new letter from a man in London whom he keeps for the purpose of making him miserable with catalogues of sales of books and papers he can't afford to buy. But he potters over them, and marks the lists, and writes back to the man in London, and, as you know, we do manage to become possessed of much more dear antiquity than the house will hold or our income warrant. This time, he is buried alive for an hour to come, for it is about a sale of Sir Philip Francis's letters and manuscripts at Sotheby's very soon."

"I don't believe the real 'Junius' announcing himself would get me out of this bamboo chair and away from this deepening of eventide upon the sea and islands, the afterglow of sunset melting into moonlight, the soft caressing of the salt air blending with those hidden heliotropes of yours! Now, dear lady, let's go back to the concrete. I knew, the moment your eagle eye fell on me this afternoon, you would find out all that in me is. For so many years I've been telling you my scrapes, I may as well out with the latest and biggest of them. Two months ago, I took Gladys Eliot in to dinner at the Sargents'. I kept it from you in town, for which you'll say I am properly punished. I fell in love with her, like a schoolboy with green apples, heeding not the danger of unwholesomeness. After that, I met her when and wherever I could push my way to her. I thought of her, sleeping and waking; received from her looks and tones and words that would, as the lady novelists are so fond of saying, 'tempt an anchorite;' believed in her!"

"My poor child, how wretched!" said Mrs. Gervase, promptly.

"So it proved. Last but not least of the comedy,—I skip the details,—I was deluded into buttoning myself up in a fluffy, long-tailed, iron-gray coat that I got in London last spring and had not had time to wear, put on a bunch of white carnations, and drove out to one of those inane Claremont teas in my friend Pierre Sargent's trap, because, forsooth, she asked me. For an hour I suffered martyrdom in that little greenhouse sort of a veranda, with people herded together gossiping, and not setting their feet upon the lawn over the river that they came out to see. Women talked drivel to me, waiters slopped tea over me, and we walked on slices of buttered bread. Then she came—on the box-seat of that brute McLaughlin's drag, having eyes for him only, so that every one talked of it!"

"I remember—and I could not imagine what brought you there. Yes, I sat down on a little cake and completely ruined my new porcelain-blue crÉpon—those waiters were very careless. Jolly faded it trying to take out the spot, and Mathilde had the greatest trouble to match the stuff. Alan, that man McLaughlin ought to be drummed out of polite society. The girl who would receive his attentions, let herself be talked of as likely to be his wife, cannot at heart be nice. When your dear mother and I were girls, we would not have looked at a big, vulgar creature like that, simply because he drove four-in-hand and was known to be rich. He would never have been asked to your grandfather's table. The materialism of this age takes, to me, no form more objectionable than the frank acceptance of such as he by women, old and young."

"Exactly," said Grove, grimly. "And when I met her at his side, she turned away from him one moment with a banal jest for me, and then quickly recaptured him, as if fearful he would escape. That, even my infatuation would not suffer. I turned on my heel, and, until I met her by chance on the boat to-day, have never seen her since."

"What can have been her reason for not going abroad?" said Mrs. Gervase, eagerly—a trifle suspiciously.

Grove was silent. In his ear sounded a dulcet voice, murmuring as the boat neared shore: "Perhaps, when you have consented to feel better friends with me, you will come and let me tell you why I stayed."

"You know, of course, that everybody says she is engaged? Her mother has hinted it to Mrs. Prettyman. If it be to this McLaughlin, then God knows you are well rid of her. If that be a blind, Alan dear,—you know it was always my way with you boys to scold about little things and let great ones pass,—I shan't add a word to your self-reproach; but I'll warn you—oh! I won't have the sin on my soul of letting you go unwarned. That woman, no matter whether she thinks she loves you or not, would make your misery. The parents of to-day don't trouble themselves to train up wives for the rank and file of our honest gentlemen. They create fine ladies, and look about for some one to take the expense of them off their hands. It is common talk that the Eliots have been strained to their utmost means to carry their girls from place to place, with the expectation of making rich marriages. The beauty and success of this one has apparently blinded those poor people to the consequences of their folly. The girl has been brought up to fancy herself of superior clay,—her habits are luxurious, her wants extravagant.

"More than all, for five years she has been fed on the flatteries of society. Personal praise is indispensable to her. She has lived and consorted with the most lavish entertainers of the most reckless society in our republic. Even supposing that you won her beauty and graces for your own, what on earth could you expect to offer her in exchange for what she would give up? My poor, dear lad, I'm talking platitudes, you think; but you and Tom and Louis shall not be allowed to wreck your futures upon such as Gladys Eliot, while I have breath to speak. I'm afraid I think all marriages a mistake for young men. I know they are, as we measure and value things, in what we call 'fashionable life.' Go out of it, by all means, if you can. To take her out of it you would find to be quite another matter. And now, after this long homily, I've one question to put. Answer it, if you like—if you think I've the right to ask it. After seeing her again to-day, do you feel there is danger in her proximity?"

"You have certainly torn sentiment to shreds," said Alan, getting up from amid his cushions and beginning to stride up and down the long veranda. Mrs. Gervase watched him without further speech. That he did not again allude to the subject sent her to bed with keen anxiety and a renewed regret that Mr. Gervase had not taken her advice about buying that point of land before it fell into the hands of the Prettymans.

For the two or three days following his arrival at Stoneacres, Grove made no attempt to see his neighbor's guest. Once, indeed, they encountered her on horseback, while driving together in a family party in the buckboard, behind the cobs. Mr. Gervase, who, in his later enthusiasm about the Junius correspondence, had forgotten his charmer, asked who was that stunning, pretty girl, and, on being rallied by his wife, declared his poor sight was at fault, and that he meant to call on the Prettymans that very day; but Saturday brought with it the appointed dinner, without other overture from Stoneacres than cards left by Mrs. Gervase when the ladies were from home.

Grove was hardly surprised when, on descending to the drawing-room in evening clothes, he found only that very colorless pair of Prettymans. Miss Eliot, it was alleged, was suffering from too long a ride in the hot sun of the afternoon to make the effort to come out. He saw in the countenance of his aunt a look of relief, which she at once proceeded to mask by unusual suavity to mankind in general, her flattered guests in particular.

"The worst is over; I am safe," Grove decided. "But I like her all the better for that womanly holding back. Now, to live down my folly as best I can."

He threw himself into hard work, and the days passed healthily. Mrs. Gervase had begun to relax her vigilance, to breathe almost free of care, when, upon one of his morning rides, ahead of him in a forest glade, he espied Gladys Eliot, in the saddle, attended by one of the Prettyman boys, a youngster of thirteen, mounted on a polo pony in process of "showing off" his and his master's accomplishments.

At the sound behind them, both Gladys and the boy turned to look; and Grove saw that he could not retreat without a decided lack of dignity. He therefore rode by them, receiving from Miss Eliot a faint and chilly nod; from the boy,—an acquaintance of last year,—a more cordial salutation.

"I say, Mr. Grove, can't Punch take that fallen tree?" cried out the lad, in shrill treble. "She says it's dangerous, because the bank is caved. Hold on one minute, and I'll show you he can clear it, bank and all."

Punch, proving nothing loth, jumped the obstacles in question gallantly, but on the far side slipped on something, and spilled his rider among a bed of tall bracken, in which the boy lay, lost to sight. Both Grove and Gladys were in a minute at his side, shocked at finding him white and senseless.

"It was not the fall," she said, rapidly. "He has heart-trouble, and his mother is always anxious about a sudden shock for him. He will outgrow it probably, the doctors say. Here, you hold him in your arms, while I get water from that brook. I know what to do, and he will soon come to himself."

Grove found himself silently obeying her behests. He was struck by her prompt presence of mind, her deftness, and good sense. "What an admirable trained nurse is lost to the world in her!" he thought, and, when all was done, and the boy gave token of returning life, sat still, content to crush down moss and ferns, awkwardly holding his burden, while Gladys knelt so close that her breath in speaking fanned his cheek.

"It wasn't Punch's fault. I've got a big bee buzzing in my head," were the welcome words they at last heard from the sufferer.

"Yes, I know, Jim dear, but don't talk now till the big bee flies away," and the boy, closing his eyes, appeared to sleep.

"Lay his head on my lap, and then, if you don't mind riding back and ordering some sort of a trap, without letting his mother know—"

"I can't leave you here. It is too far from home, and the country hereabouts is quite bare of dwellings. Nor would I like you to ride so far alone. There; let him sleep, and we will watch him till he wakes. No doctor could have treated him more cleverly than you."

"It's the result of a 'First Aid to the Injured' class I went to once, perhaps. But I always had a knack with ill people," she said, dropping the deep fringes of her eyes upon damask cheeks.

That evening, Grove could do no less than call to inquire after Master Jim, who, not much the worse for his attack, kept his adoring mother in durance at his bedside, while Grove sat watching the opal flushes die out of a western sky, in company with Gladys. Quite another Gladys was this, in all save beauty and her dulcet voice, from his enslaver of town life.

And now, to Mrs. Gervase's ill-concealed dismay, visits, meetings, rides, boating, began and continued daily. Grove was teaching Miss Eliot chess, he said, and the other things were what they call upon the stage "incidental divertisements."

A fortnight of glorious weather had passed thus, when, on the eve of Grove's return to town and work, he asked Gladys to go out in a boat with him to watch the sunset on the water.

"Now you have told me there is no reason I may not speak, I can wait no longer for an answer," he said, as, resting on his oars, he scanned her face eagerly. "When a man tears his heart out and throws it at a woman's feet, surely he offers something. But that, you know, is my all. If you can consent to share the kind of life mine has got to be for the next five or six years, I think I see daylight beyond. By that time, your first youth will be gone, you will be forgotten by the people who court you now, you will be a nobody in their esteem. To me, you will always be the one woman of the world. You will have the full love of my heart; and you shall see what that means, when a true man pours it upon you unrestrained. I don't pretend to be worth it, Heaven knows. But I do say you have never before been loved by a man like me, and you know it and feel it thoroughly. It's for you to take or leave me, accepting consequences."

"What a stand-and-deliver kind of love-making," Gladys tried to say; but she was deeply stirred. Remaining silent, her eyes filled with tears; her head drooped towards her breast.

"Gladys!" cried he, exultingly.

"Don't you see, now, the real reason why I could not go abroad?" she said, smiling on him brightly, and lifting, at the same moment, her ungloved left hand to put back a loose lock of hair that the wind had blown across her cheek. Grove, gazing at her with his whole soul in his eyes, became aware of a ring upon the fourth finger,—a ring of such conspicuous brilliancy and choice gems as to convey but one meaning,—and his expression changed.

"Oh! I hate it! I shall give it back!" she exclaimed, a burning blush settling upon her face. "I did not mean—it was an accident. I hate it, I tell you! Why do you look at me like that?"

She tore the ring from her hand, and impetuously put it out of sight. Presently, as Grove, in mechanical fashion, resumed his rowing without a word, she cried out, passionately:

"Why do you not ask me to explain all the—circumstances of my life since I saw you last? Why can't you understand that a girl situated as I am has temptations that at times seem to her irresistible? Need I mortify myself by telling you that I am driven—driven till I feel as if I would do anything to get rest from eternal lectures about what a rich marriage has got to do for me—and for others? Yes, you are right in saying that a man like you never before asked me to marry him. Because I feel that—because—because—Oh! you are cruel not to speak—to help me! How can I put into words that I am willing to give up all—"

It was impossible, facing the rigid coldness of his face, to go on. She sat in wretched silence till they reached shore, and he gave her his chilly hand to help her upon the float. Then the touch of her fingers sent a tremor of relenting into his veins.

"Oh, if I could! If I could! But he too—that other one—believed. Tell me; he does not still believe in you?"

"I hate him," she said, doggedly. She shivered a little, as the quickened breeze of evening struck her thinly-clad form.

Grove, clasping her hand, gazed into her eyes with a desperate resolve to read her heart.

"Let me go—it is no use," she said, turning away from him.

And, with a sigh deep as Fate, he loosened his hold of her—forever.