MRS. Gueste looked out from the pink shade of her parasol at the cool green curl of the breakers down the beach with an actual frown between her fine brows. Her eyes were full of queries. Her delicate thumb and forefinger nipped a note. It was from her favorite brother. It had been brought to her that morning half an hour after hers had been sent apprising him of her arrival in Santa Barbara. It ran:

Dear Lil: Great to have you here. Awfully sorry can’t lunch. Another engagement can’t break. See you afternoon.

Wallie.

That was a note to have from one’s favorite brother, her frown said, as she turned to her friend.

“But if her family is so good——” she began, taking up the conversation where they had dropped it. The sentence seemed connected in her mind with the note, at which she looked.

“Oh, but they can’t manage her,” replied Julia Crosby, punching her parasol tip into the sand. “Mr. Remi died when Blanche was a baby. Mrs. Remi is a nervous invalid. Blanche has run wild since she could run at all. If she were a boy—well, she’d be the ‘black sheep.’”

“Is she fast?” said Lillian Gueste, with horrified emphasis.

“Oh, no!” Mrs. Crosby hastened. But she seemed to find it difficult to explain to her friend just what Blanche Remi was. “She’s—well, she’s wild. She does such things—things none of the other girls do. She drives a sulky. She rides in a man’s coat and red gloves. It sounds so silly when you tell it,” she ended, feeling she had failed to properly impress her friend, “but you can always see her coming a mile away, whether it’s golf or a garden party.”

“You mean she’s a tomboy?” said Mrs. Gueste, doubtfully. Her smile said that Walter would never take that sort seriously.

“Oh, if it were only that!” Mrs. Crosby’s gesture was eloquent. “Do you know what they call her here?”

“They?”

“Well, everybody. Some man, I think, started it. They call her ‘the Wrecker.’”

“The Wrecker?” Mrs. Gueste’s inquiring eyes were on her friend.

“Because every man in Santa Barbara,” Julia Crosby went on, “has at one time or another——”

“Run after her? Oh!” Disgust was in the last little word. Mrs. Gueste understood it all in a moment. “She’s that sort. Is she pretty?”

“Stunning! Overwhelming!” said Mrs. Crosby, generously. She herself was little and indefinite.

“M-m-m! So poor Wallie is overwhelmed?” Lillian mused. “Julie, why didn’t you let me know sooner?”

“But, my dear girl, it was all so vague! Even now I don’t know that there’s anything—but there was getting to be such talk!”

“But you think he’s serious?” Mrs. Gueste’s smile was deprecating.

“I don’t know. That’s why I telegraphed. I knew you would.” Her eyes roved anxiously down the beach, and suddenly fixed. “There they are now,” she said, with a small, sharp excitement.

Lillian Gueste started, peered under her pink parasol. Some dozen rods distant the plaza and the beach below it fluttered with the moving colors of a crowd. Between the plaza and the bath houses lay an empty space of beach, and down that glittering white perspective came a horse with a light sulky. They could make out two people in it: a man, holding on his hat; a woman bareheaded, driving—driving so that one wheel of the sulky spun the foam of the receding water. The man was Wallie—Wallie laughing, hugely enjoying it.

Still at a little distance the sulky stopped; the driver gave the reins to her escort, and sprang out with the light, certain leap of a cat. An indifferent Englishman, who had noticed nothing before, put his glass in his eye and stared. It may be he had never seen anything so tawny, so glistening, so magnificent, as the undulant masses of hair gathered up on the crown of the girl’s head. A long tan-colored ulster, the collar turned up around her throat, fell to her feet. She stood pulling off a pair of red gloves, looking up and laughing to Walter Carter, who got out with his habitual lazy lurch.

The two were near the narrow plank that led from the women’s bath houses. Bathers were coming out in bathrobes, which, five steps from the door, they left hanging on the rope, while they hopped, high-shouldered and shivering, down the beach. The girl kicked off her tennis shoes and handed them to Walter, stripped off her ulster, and stood out in a scarlet bathing dress that, covering the knees, left bare legs, slim, brown and dimpled as a child’s. She lingered across the interval of dry sand, calling over her shoulder to Walter something that left him a-grin with amusement; then went joyously down the dip of the beach for the rush of the incoming breakers, and launched into it with the swash of a little, launching ship. The lawlessness of it was beyond any words Lillian knew.

“You see, she does things like that,” Mrs. Crosby explained in her friend’s ear.

“Oh, impossible!” Lillian murmured, watching Blanche Remi’s bathing dress glimmer through the green breakers. “Do you suppose Wallie is going in, too?” she added, glancing down the beach.

The young man was sauntering toward them, unconscious of his sister’s scrutiny, his steps directed, probably, toward the men’s bath houses on the left of where the two women sat. He was as lankly dawdling as ever, but Lillian noted, with a vague uneasiness, his usual air of agreeable ennui was supplanted by one of half-wakened interest. The remnant of a smile was on his habitually serious face.

Mrs. Gueste stood up and motioned with her lorgnon. He saw, stared, smiled broadly, delightedly, and hastened toward her.

“I say,” he said, subsiding between them, “this is luck! But why didn’t you let a chap know you were coming a few hours before you landed? What started you, anyway? I thought you had planned for Castle Crag.”

Julia Crosby’s telegram was hot in Lillian’s pocket, and she thought, anxiously, that Julia’s face was conscious enough to give the thing away. But Walter was frankly unsuspicious.

“If I’d known just a day ahead,” he reproached her, “I could have lunched with you as well as not.”

“But your engagement?” Lillian hinted.

“Oh, to bring Miss Remi down for a dip. I was going up for you while she paddled ’round, but now I’ve got you here, too, I won’t have to budge.”

Little as she liked the idea of being thus lumped with Blanche Remi, Lillian made it a point to be lovely.

“Miss Remi?” she wondered, sweetly.

“Why, yes. Didn’t you see us?” He was just a little conscious. “There she is at the raft,” he added. “You must meet her, Lil; mustn’t she, Mrs. Crosby? There’s no one in Santa Barbara like her.”

“Really?” Mrs. Gueste looked through her lorgnon at the glinting speck traveling out on the water.

Wallie frowned. He hated his sister’s lorgnon, and her lorgnon manner was his bÊte noir.

“I am afraid we shan’t be able to wait until Miss—er”—she searched for the name—“comes out. We must be at the house by three.”

“Oh, that’s all right. I’ll signal her to come back. Where’s something?” His hand fell on his sister’s parasol, and before she could protest he had it at the edge of the beach, waving over his head. It was probably the first conspicuous performance of that very discreet parasol; and as for the punctilious Wallie——!

“Do you suppose he gets that sort of thing from her?” Lillian articulated.

“I suppose so,” Mrs. Crosby agreed, faintly. She felt a wish to escape being present at the approaching introduction. “If you don’t mind, Lily,” she excused herself, “I really ought to run uptown and see Mrs. Herrick for a few moments. You remember I promised her.”

“Why, of course. Wallie will see me home.” Lillian smiled, remembering how in their school days Julia’s conscience had always precipitated the crisis, and dodged the consequences.

She sat composedly alone in the sand, watching the glinting speck drawing landward. Wallie stood awaiting it, his toes in the water, his sister’s pink parasol held like a saber in his hand.

As the girl came splashing through the shallow flow, dripping, glowing, shaking the drops from her hair, Mrs. Gueste saw she carried a little dog, a terrier, in her arms, and this seemed to put the last touch to her conspicuousness. She came up the beach talking, gesticulating vividly, to Walter. Once she nodded to a loose-lipped, pleasant-eyed man who passed them, but she did not give Mrs. Gueste a glance until she was fairly before her—until Walter spoke his sister’s name. Then, when she gave suddenly the full glow of her face, and the strength and light of her hot, hazel eyes, she was, as Mrs. Crosby had said, overwhelming. The touch of her damp hand to Mrs. Gueste’s delicate glove was the touch of compelling physical magnetism that could be looked at safely only through a lorgnon.

But not the lorgnon, nor its accompanying manner, disconcerted Miss Remi. Her own manner was easy, without freeness.

“You do look like your brother, Mrs. Gueste,” she said, seating herself in the sand, and warning the wet terrier away with upraised finger.

“Flattered, Lillian?” Wallie murmured, with cloaked satisfaction.

“Oh, you’re very nice looking, Wallie,” Blanche Remi told him, with a frank, smiling, up-and-down glance.

Mrs. Gueste’s lorgnon rose sharply to this sentence, but her voice was gentle.

“Don’t you find it rather cold going in this morning?” she asked.

The girl’s faint change of expression appreciated the round turn that had been given the conversation.

“Oh, it’s always pretty cold, but I keep moving, so I keep warm,” she said. There was a glint of mischief in her wonderful eyes.

“But don’t you feel cold while you’re out?” Mrs. Gueste persisted.

The girl, sitting unwinking, unfrowning, in the glare, looked like some luxurious creature sunning itself. A faint, fine powdering of freckles gave even her skin a tawny hue. Even down the throat, where Lillian was milk white, she showed a tint like old ivory, with creamy shadows under the square chin. She looked up at Lillian Gueste’s face in the dainty shadow of her parasol.

“Do I look cold?” she laughed. “You must let me show you how to keep warm. Do you swim? Oh, you should! It saves your nine lives. You ride, of course?”

“If I can find a horse that suits me.” Mrs. Gueste’s soft reply suggested she was hard to suit.

“You must try my Swallow. She’s perfect. We must have a saddle party, mustn’t we, Wallie?” the girl appealed to him. “But first you may take me to call on Mrs. Gueste. I know she’ll have too many engagements to risk calling on her hit-or-miss.”

Mrs. Gueste’s reply was a murmur, as she rose, shaking out her soft linen skirts.

Walter Carter felt indefinitely uncomfortable. Blanche Remi stood beside his sister, slightly taller, more vigorously, more carelessly, more brilliantly made. She looked rather commanding, as if she were used to having things her own way; which was precisely what Lillian, little as she looked it, was used to having. But now her manner toward Blanche was almost appealing.

“I am going to beg your escort away from you, Miss Remi, if you will permit it, just to drive me back to Mrs. Crosby’s. I haven’t seen him for three months, you know.” Her voice and eyes somehow made three months seem interminable.

Blanche did not show by the flicker of an eyelash that she appreciated the cleverness of this maneuver. “Why, that’s a dreadful loss of time for Wallie,” she said.

He thanked her with a glance that made his sister wince.

“Then shall I come back for you—Blanche?” The name came out after a moment’s hesitation.

“Oh, no! Blair Hemming will drive me back.”

Lillian felt a vague resentment that the girl should be so sure.

“And don’t forget about to-morrow,” Blanche warned Wallie, bidding good-by, and left him wondering what had been to-morrow. Nothing had, but the words, as Blanche had wickedly foreseen, lingered in Mrs. Gueste’s mind, and vexed her.

“You have so many engagements, I wonder whether I shall see you at all,” she hinted, as he handed her into the runabout.

He flushed slightly. “Well,” he said, genially, as he took the reins, “you know there are mighty few of ’em I wouldn’t break for you, Lil.”

As they spun down the spongy asphalt of the boulevard, between the palms and electric-light poles, she was asking herself why it was that good, unsuspecting fellows like Wallie were always pounced upon by such women. She felt it was horrid to meddle, but this creature was so astonishingly impossible, and yet so overwhelming, that Wallie could hardly be expected to rescue himself. But she was cautious.

“Did you meet Miss Remi here, Wallie?” she asked him.

“Yes, at something at the country club.”

“Does she go there?”

“Why, of course. All the nice people go there.” He looked at her in lazy surprise.

“Oh!” she said, with a falling inflection. It was discouraging to find him so unconscious. “Does she go much?”

“Everywhere. She’s awfully popular. How does she strike you?” He tried to be casual.

“She’s not like anyone else I’ve seen in Santa Barbara,” Lillian replied.

He fairly glowed. She had never seen Wallie so enthusiastic.

“You’re just right, Lil! There is no one like her. She makes every other girl look like a dough doll! It’s not only that she’s beautiful—she isn’t afraid of anything, she don’t care how she looks—she’s just crackling with life.”

“Do you admire her so awfully?” Lillian said, with such an amazed emphasis on the personal pronoun as brought him up short.

“Why—er—of course. Why not? Don’t you?” The color came up under his brown skin.

“Well,” she said, slowly, “of course I’ve only met her once; but really, Wallie, is she quite—fine?”

“Fine? What do you mean?”

She knew that he knew what she meant. The word was not a new one from her. It was her measure, her ruler by which she judged the world. He was not so unconscious, then, as he seemed.

“I mean what you’ve been so accustomed to in women, you dear, that you don’t know they can lack it,” she said, caressingly. “Is she nice? Is she a lady?”

Something threatening looked out of her brother’s eyes. “Well, I introduced her to you.”

“I know. You put me in rather a difficult position, Wallie.”

“See here, Lil”—he dragged out his words with slow emphasis—“I don’t know who you’ve been listening to, but you can take it from me that’s she as fine as silk and as good as gold.”

“Oh, as to her goodness, I haven’t a doubt, of course.” She seemed to set this aside as a trifle. “But as to fineness, now, Wallie, what do you think of a girl driving through town in her bathing suit, with a man, and jumping out of her coat and shoes on the beach before everyone, as she did? She did it to make a sensation; and do you think that fine, Wallie?”

He flushed, but laughed.

“Nonsense. It was a whim—a freak. She thought nothing at all of any effect on the beach. That’s the trouble; she thinks too little of the effect, and so——”

“And so she wears no stockings—and so she’s called ‘the Wrecker,’” his sister added, with inconsequent effect.

His face was grave, even disturbed. “Oh, yes, I’ve heard that. But she’s so beautiful, so happy, you can’t wonder at the attraction; and you know there’s always gossip. And then she’s run wild. She has had no one to take care of her——” he left the sentence hanging.

His sister inwardly shivered. When a man talked about “taking care” in that tone, she seemed to see the end.

They were winding up the wide, wandering Main Street, the rose-covered verandas of the Arlington on their left; on the right an old garden ran back to the white stucco fronts and red tiles of the De la Gera place.

“Wallie,” Lillian asked him, softly, “are you in love with that girl?”

“Me! Oh, what a question, Lil!” He laughed at her—his nice, lazy laugh she loved so much.

“Are you, Wallie?”

He put up his monocle to meet her lorgnon. “My dear girl, do I look pale and sunken?”

“You are dodging the question. But think”—she was light, almost playful, over it—“is she the sort of woman you would care to introduce as your—wife?”

Wallie looked a little startled, but he took her tone. “My dear Lil, I haven’t thought of her in quite that way.” He grew more serious. “I think she’s wonderful. I never saw anyone like her. You must know her better.”

“I don’t see how I can,” Lillian sighed.

“You mean you won’t see her?”

“I suppose I must, since you are going to bring her to call. But I won’t go about with her. I can’t. Couldn’t you see there on the beach—she isn’t our kind?”

“She looks nothing like you, certainly, Lillian,” he replied, coolly, “if you insist on judging people by appearances, but it’s hardly a ‘fine’ way to judge.”

“Now, Wallie——” they had turned into the Crosby drive, between the rose of sharon and syringa bushes.

“Of course,” he went on, “you’re always waving that word around as if it were the only thing worth being, and every virtue hung on it. But what about honor, and generosity, and simplicity, and courage? Are they nothing compared to it?”

The runabout had stopped before the piazza steps, but Lillian sat still a moment, frowning faintly.

“When I said ‘fine,’” she answered, “I didn’t mean fine finish, cultivation, which is a surface thing, but I meant fine fiber, which goes deep and counts in every way with everything. One judges the big things by the small ones,” she said, as Wallie handed her out, “and remembering mother, and the way we were brought up to feel and understand, I think you will presently agree with me that Miss Remi is hardly—fine.”

She gave him a smile with the last word; and her look, the movement of her graceful head in the turn, the poise of her delicate body, the fall of her delicate dress, showed forth every shade of meaning which that word could contain.

The memory of her thus was with him all the afternoon. It buzzed like a bee in his brain that night through the dinner at the Crosbys’, though Lillian, ravishing in daintily blended shades of chiffon, referred by no suggestion to the talk of the afternoon. She and her word, he thought, mutually described one another. Lillian was fine, and fine meant Lillian.

Deep down or on the surface, he knew she was the real thing. And the inevitable, following question was, what was Blanche Remi? She was the real thing, too. He was sure of that. Lil was ’way off, he told himself, when she said the big things showed up in the little. He had been bothered all his life by the petty goodnesses of women, and now that he had found one who had the great goodness he was not going to be disturbed by Lil’s scruples. As for being “in love” with Blanche Remi—Lillian had put it to him as he had never put it to himself.

From the first night her marvelous eyes had flashed into his indolent notice, he had felt an inclination to exterminate every other man who talked to her. And there were so many. The supposition on the tongues of Santa Barbara that all these men made love to her he had not believed—could not have tolerated. Why he had not made love to her himself was not from lack of impulse, but something in the very greatness of the emotions and passions she roused in him, something in her fine, free ignorance of the trifles that make up the virtue of most women, had made any trifling with her impossible to him. But he felt himself brought down to facts. What was he finally intending toward this girl whom he never saw without wanting to kiss, to carry off? His wife?

Well, Lil was right. Blanche did lack the superficial polish. Strange he hadn’t noticed that before. But that was just the use of Lil. She could be a lot of help if she could only be made to like Blanche, and, of course, all that was necessary was that Lil should know her better. He would, he decided, take Blanche to call there to-morrow.

With a little telephoning this was arranged, and Wallie had it all made out just how beautifully he would direct that interview and carry it through. But the direction was reversed at the beginning by so small an incident as a woman’s hat. Not that the hat was, in itself, so slight an affair. Indeed, when Blanche came out to where he waited her, curbing the most impatient horse in Santa Barbara, the hat was the first thing he saw.

It was wide. It was hung about with lace—too much lace. It was covered with pink roses—too many roses. Walter did not quite know what to think of it, but he had a feeling that Lillian would.

As Blanche sprang into the cart with that vigorous, energetic lift of her body in which the muscles seemed always tense with action:

“Where’s that little white, flyaway thing you used to wear?” he ventured.

“Oh, I don’t know—this is a new one. Don’t you like it?”

“Isn’t it a little—large for driving?”

She flushed but smiled. “Not for calling. Now, Wallie, that’s the first time since you met me that you’ve noticed my clothes. I don’t believe you’ve known whether I’ve had any. Is it because you’ve been having ideals put under your nose? Is it”—she laughed, drawing on a pair of extremely long lavender gloves—“because you are afraid your sister won’t approve of my hat, any more than she approved of my legs?”

It was this astonishing freedom of speech, more than the hat, that made him uneasy of the approaching interview. Of course Blanche could say what she liked to him. He understood. But the very idea of her talking that way to Lillian made him shiver.

But Blanche did not talk “that way” to Lillian. There in the Crosby garden, where the magnolias dropped languid petals on the lawn, she was touchingly like a little girl on her good behavior. She tried, with her anxious sweetness, to make Wallie’s sister like her. But Lillian had seen the hat first, and got no further. It was to the hat she talked, and it seemed to Walter that his sister’s costume, so notably discreet, somehow set off all the daring of Blanche Remi’s gown, the telling blacks of which were touched in at the most unexpected intervals. Was Lillian, instead of helping, trying to put Blanche at her worst? He thrust that thought out of sight as disloyal. He sat, wretchedly uncomfortable, trying to remember whether he had ever seen Lillian wear long lavender gloves, hearing Lillian deftly turn and dispose of, unanswered, Blanche Remi’s suggestions for horseback excursions and “plunge parties.”

He expected, with every covert snub, that Blanche would suddenly, diabolically turn tables on her, as he had seen her do with other women. But Blanche, who had always had what she wanted, now, for perhaps the first time in her life, wanted a woman to like her. And it did not occur to her that she should fail in her desire. But what had been her strength was now her failure. Her compelling magnetism alarmed Lillian Gueste. She had been thoroughly convinced at first glance that the girl was “bad form.” But now she felt her force as something terrible and threatening to Wallie. The very sweetness of the smile Blanche gave her in going seemed too rich.

“But the protection,” Lillian reasoned, going over the interview afterward with herself, “is that Wallie is beginning to see.”

Wallie, bitterly irritated, saw, indeed, many trifles that he had failed to see before, perplexing as so many pricks. Things he had thought amusing in Blanche Remi—her red gloves, her white spats, her man’s hunting coat, the terrier she took to receptions—would they do for Mrs. Walter Carter? Suppose he should put it to Blanche that way, would she take it from him? he wondered. He felt he must put it to her some way now—the questions of Mrs. Walter Carter—for in the background, dimly threatening him, was that aggregation, each one a future possibility—the pasts he would not contemplate—and all villainously responsible for the name gossip had fastened upon her, “the Wrecker.” He knew that Santa Barbara accounted her a “dangerous” woman, but to him, even with her fatal fascination, she had always seemed a child. And now it came to him that it was not the help of a woman, but the protection of a man, Blanche Remi required most.

He felt he could not wait a day, a moment, to tell her; but somehow it was very difficult to find that moment; his time was so unostentatiously but so thoroughly permeated and broken with Lillian’s engagements for him. A week escaped in which, without having seen Blanche less, he had seen her under circumstances that admitted no opportunity.

Lillian had not, as she first threatened, ignored Blanche. She had invited her, if not to dine, at least to a beach tea, to a driving party; had talked with her at the country club; had kept her before Wallie, always at arm’s length, as if to give him ample opportunity for comparison.

Walter could find no flaw in his sister’s attitude of disinterested politeness, of pale cordiality toward Blanche Remi, but side lights on it now and then made him suspicious. He was bewildered—as bewildered as a man tangled in a veil. He felt that the first fine intimacy of his fellowship with Blanche was dulled. He was distressed with a sense of being on a more formal footing with her. At the same time others—men who had been very much in the background—seemed to come forward into her notice. He saw her at the country club dances magnetize the men too bored to dance into an interested circle round her. Dismayed, he saw her first with one, then with another, driving, swimming, sitting on the beach under one parasol in the association so intimate, so informal, that, before Lillian came, he had usurped to the exclusion of the many. Finally, out of the crowd, as the one oftenest with her, he saw Blair Hemming, the man of loose lips and good-natured eyes, to whom Blanche had bowed that morning on the beach.

Walter had thought him a decent enough fellow, but now he was suddenly vile. And Blanche? Her behavior was unreasonable and unfair. But perhaps he had let himself drift too much with Lillian’s plans. A little self-accusing, a little self-righteous, he rang up the Remis’s to make an appointment to ride horseback with Blanche that afternoon.

Her voice reached him, nasal, resonant, with a vibrant quality that touched the ear with a fascination deeper than sweetness. She had a luncheon engagement at the club.

He was annoyed that he had not known of this.

“How about to-morrow?”

“Very well,” came back; “but make it a foursome. Get your sister to come.”

“Of course, if you would rather,” he answered, a little stiffly. “What has happened?” he asked himself. He knew he had done nothing. Was Blanche changing? Had he only imagined her attitude toward him differed from her attitude toward half a dozen others? It had seemed different—but how could a man be sure?

Harassed, suspicious, he hesitated over making the proposal to Lillian until the next afternoon at the last moment. He rode over to the Crosbys’ and found his sister, fair and diaphanous in her mousseline gown, crumbling bread to the gold fish in the fountain. The look she gave his proposition, sweet as it was, made him uncomfortable. Any man would do to fill in the fourth place, he had stupidly said.

“Any man for Miss Remi?” she had asked him. And he had fired.

She heard him with a half smile, softly beating the ground with the dried palm leaf she prettily carried as a parasol.

Well, she told him, she did not care particularly for such an expedition. It was such a time since she had seen him alone! Wouldn’t it be much nicer to make it just a tÊte-À-tÊte dinner at Estrelda’s?

He replied, with irritation, that if she did not care to make one of the party, it would not prevent him from taking Miss Remi.

“Ah, a previous arrangement,” Lillian said, taking in his whip and his riding boots as if she had just noticed them. “Well, you must realize by this time just what sort of a person she is.”

“I am far from being sure, but I intend to find out this afternoon.”

She turned sharply. “You mean you are going to ask her to marry you?”

“Well, if I am?”

“After the way she’s been running about with this Hemming?”

“Lillian—look out,” he warned. His sister’s smile was tight and fine.

“Oh, well,” she said, with a little shrug, letting her hands drop in a gesture that seemed to make an end of the matter. At the moment her brother appeared to her no less than a monster. But she watched him down the drive with a revulsion of mood. She felt he was leaving her forever, her Wallie, her little brother! He was a year younger than she. She had let her sense of personal injury get in the way of his happiness—and he was going to that woman.

She stood, the palm leaf fallen from her hand. He must be stopped, interrupted somehow. He should not do a thing in a heat to regret forever. Calling his name, she hurried down the drive to the gate, but he had already turned out of the side street, and was beyond both sight and call. She fairly ran across the garden, over lawns and borders, her gown streaming, regardless of dust or wet. Had anyone seen her running, flushed and breathless, across the piazza and up the stairs, he would scarcely have recognized, in her abandon, Mrs. Cornelius Gueste.

She hurried into her habit, trying to remember whether Wallie had said they would go down through Monticito and come back by the beach, or whether it were just the other way about. Where could she hope to catch up with them? It would be a humiliating affair enough for her; but she was not in the least thinking of herself, but only of Wallie, and some way by which she could avert his catastrophe.

Walter had departed with the responsibility of what he was about to do heavily upon him. His sister’s look had not failed to affect him. He felt he was adventuring, risking, going to deal with unknown quantities.

He was to meet Blanche in town, where she had told him she had some shopping to do. Halfway down the wide, wandering Main Street he saw her mare fastened in front of the confectioner’s. Riding up, he could glimpse through the glass door Blanche, a tall habited figure, strolling here and there, sampling the sweets. He sat waiting, scowling in the glare of the afternoon sun on white awnings and sidewalks. He saw Hemming jump out of his cart a few doors down, in front of the saddler’s, with a broken bridle over, his arm.

“Hey, Carter!” He came and leaned on the flank of Walter’s horse, his hand on the back of the saddle.

“Beastly familiar,” Walter thought.

Hemming’s good-natured, sensual face was vivid with animal spirits. “Where were you last night?” he said. “You did miss it!”

“What?” drawled Walter.

“Mrs. Jack Castra’s dinner dance. Great!” Hemming’s eyes narrowed. He shook his head. “I got Blanche Remi a bid. You know she wanted one like the devil. Mrs. Jack is a terrible stickler, but we’re great pals, and she let me have it.”

“Miss Remi went?” Walter’s voice was very lazy.

“Did she go?” Hemming laughed. “I’ll tell you what it is,” he said, “the Wrecker’s a wonder! She’s such a wonder that most of the women say, ‘Hands off.’ But between you and me, she makes every other woman look like a Dutch doll.”

Walter had an impulse to strike Hemming. His own words had been flung back at him, but he failed to recognize them.

“Oh, I had a good time,” Hemming repeated, significantly, but unmalicious. “So long.” He sauntered into the saddler’s.

Walter watched the confectioner’s door opening. So Blanche was under an obligation—such an obligation—to Hemming! He had not thought Hemming such a bad lot, but now—— Things Lillian had said crowded back to him. And Blanche’s attitude lately? The color thickened in his sallow cheeks.

Blanche came out of the door with a swing. She was eating a chocolate. As she stood under the rippling awning, pulling on her red gloves, he saw she was glowing with excitement. The weight of her splendid hair under her man’s hat, the play of color in her eyes, the slight backward fling of her figure as she poised—each detail proclaimed eloquently how fully she was a conscious, vital force, stupendous to reckon with.

“Where’s Mrs. Gueste?” was the first question she tossed at him, with a straight, studying look.

“Er—she had a headache—and—er, another engagement,” he added, lamely.

Blanche laughed. “One would have been enough,” she said; but the curve of her lip quivered. She stopped his reply with a second question.

“Who ran away as I came out?” she asked, settling in her saddle.

“Blair Hemming.” He looked at her sharply, but she showed no consciousness; only a smile, as though Hemming were something funny.

“Did you have an amusing time last night?” he asked her.

Some vague reminder of Lillian Gueste’s voice startled her. The color deepened in her cheeks. “Oh, lovely! Hemming”—she never gave a title to a name—“took me to the Castras’.”

“Did he get you the invitation?”

She looked at him in surprise.

“I didn’t ask him for it. He offered it.”

“But you took it?”

“Why not? Everyone does it.”

Walter looked at her uneasily. He knew well enough that everyone didn’t. He said stiffly: “I don’t like the idea of your being under obligations to a man like Hemming.”

She looked at him with a quick flush. It might have been anger or pleasure. But then her lashes lowered over her eyes to cover the secret.

“You don’t!” she said. “And how do you suppose Hemming likes my being under obligations to you?”

He was aghast. “What has he got to say about it?”

“What have you?” She let it fall gently.

“Good heavens!” he burst out. “Do you lump us? I thought that you and I were—were——”

“Friends?” she filled in without a quaver. “We were. But you’ve changed, Wallie.”

“Since——”

“Your sister came.”

“What nonsense——” he began, eagerly.

“No”—her eyes were somber, smoldering—“she hates me!” Blanche emphasized the word with her whip on the mare’s flank. “She thinks I’m awful! Hasn’t she said that to you?”

“She has said nothing of the sort. She has nothing to do with it.”

“She has everything!” Blanche said, suddenly, passionately. She jerked the mare’s head fiercely.

They had turned out of the dazzling street into a softly sprinkled side way, where the pepper trees wept their tassels in the dust. Blanche kept her eyes on the bit of blue sky that seemed to close the end of the street like a jewel in a setting.

“Before she came you took me for just what I was. You believed in me, Walter. But ever since she said things, I feel—oh, I don’t know! As if you were a long way off, watching me, and wondering about everything I say and do.”

He broke in: “Because once or twice I criticised some trifle!”

“Oh,” she cried, “don’t think I wouldn’t take criticism from you! I’d take a lot. I’d even wear the sort of hats your sister does!”

“Oh, confound the sort of hats! You know that’s not it. It’s—I—love you, Blanche.”

He brought out the little isolated sentence breathlessly, with a jerk. His sallow face was flushed.

Blanche was very pale. The horses took five steps while there was silence. Then:

“It’s sweet of you to say that.” The girl’s voice was shaken. “But you know, Walter, as she does, I’m not her kind.”

“But I don’t want you to be!”

“Don’t you, Walter?” She looked at him earnestly. “And I’m not your kind, either. I mean, I’m not like the women you’ve known. She’s made me feel that—your sister. It’s one reason why I hate her. Oh, I do!” She nodded at him. “You may as well know that. She makes me see what I’ve missed—little things I thought didn’t matter. But now——”

“But, child,” he interrupted, exasperated, manlike, with her self-depreciations, “those little things don’t count! It isn’t that. But if you loved me——”

“If I loved you?” She turned large, astonished eyes on him.

“Well, you wouldn’t take things from Blair Hemming. I won’t stand it,” he broke out. “He was talking about you, Blanche.”

“What did he say?”

“That makes no difference. A woman can’t afford to be talked about in any way. She can’t know a man in such a way.”

“In what way?” The girl was breathless.

He seemed to see long perspectives of pasts: the crowds around her at the dances; the men at dinners, talking to her across the disapproval of the other women; the looks following her down the beach. “Well, you know what I mean,” he answered, sullenly.

“Oh, Walter!” Her arms fell at her sides with a gesture of eloquent despair. She seemed to divine his retrospection. “But I can’t help it! I don’t do it on purpose—though I know people say I do. You don’t—don’t think I’m ‘the Wrecker’?” She aimed the word at him like a blow, and while he sought an answer: “You don’t believe me. You don’t trust me. You’re wondering now whether I let Hemming make love to me. Hemming!”—she leaned toward him with a savage head shake. “I may not know a good hat when I see one, but I know a good man!”

The spur pricked. The mare bounded. She was rods away before Walter realized he was deserted. Then he followed. The girl turned and motioned him back.

“Go away, go away!” she cried. There was something at once so imperious and so entreating in voice and gesture that he involuntarily halted, and she wheeled and spurred on at a gallop.

If she had not ridden so headlong she must have shrieked. The tempest in her was too much for expression. She saw, subconsciously, a gray blur of olive trees streaming past, with here and there the richer note of orange orchards, and always the road before her, an intense white line over and around the smooth-topped hills. She did not slacken pace at the passing phaËtons, though these may have contained people whom she knew. She dared not look behind her, through a stifling hope and doubt that Walter had followed. She breasted the last hill crest, where the road lifts out of the gardens and orchards of Monticito to the high, wind-raked bluff above the sea.

Here she reined in and turned and looked back down the long, straight stretch of road she had come. Empty, far as eye could see. She listened, breathlessly, but the interminable whisper of the eucalyptus leaves above her head was the only sound. And she had thought so surely he would follow!

She covered her face with her hands and sobbed—crying like a man, with deep chest respirations that shook her whole body. The mare, feeling a relaxed rein, moved a few steps. The girl’s hands fell from her face. She looked seaward through the slim, swaying eucalyptus trees. The tears rolled down her cheeks to the corners of her twitching mouth. Mechanically she wiped them away with the wrist of her red glove. It left odd, bloodlike streaks on her tawny skin. They gave a menacing look to her despair. She was not thinking of how she looked, but of whom she had left, of how she loved him! She was feeling, with her blind forsakenness, that if Walter gave her up she was lost. If he only knew how little the other people mattered! How good, how awfully, abjectly good, she could be if she had him—the only man who had never made love to her! She remembered, with a stir of pure pleasure, how at first she had been piqued and puzzled that he did not. Afterward, how she had loved him for it! But since this woman, his sister, had come, Blanche did not know how it had been brought about, but she knew that she and Walter, who had been so close, so understanding, were apart and at odds. He had trusted her, and now he suspected her.

She saw Lillian Gueste’s hand in it. Blanche did not reason; she only felt, and hated the subtle and delicate treason. Did Lillian Gueste suppose, she asked herself, that because a woman wore large hats and loud gloves she had no right to the man she loved?

She rode along the cliff edge at a foot pace, her eyes abstractedly on the dancing shadows of eucalyptus leaves the sun painted in the dust. She wondered was this the close of what had been opening out before her as her life? She thought, with her primitive reasoning, were Lillian only out of the way—her mind did not get further than that. But Blanche had felt from the first that Lillian Gueste had come to Santa Barbara for no other reason than rescuing her brother, and that she did not intend to go until she took Wallie with her. “Could she do that?” Blanche wondered in a panic. Had an opportunity offered, she would have pushed Lillian Gueste out of her way as she would have thrust a pebble from her path.

The sun, falling low in the western sky, made towers of tree shadows, and spread an iridescence over the in creeping fog, as she followed the descending road downward toward the arroya, where a bridle path slipped seaward under willows. She had taken that path often before. It met the beach below what was the usual limit for riders, but she loved the long, exciting gallop, the scramble among the rocks, the spice of danger at the narrow turns about the two points when the tide was coming in.

The salt smell of the sea met her, strong with reek of kelp, as she approached its thunder through the willows. The range of sea and sky, the free wind blowing between, gave her release from thought and scope to act. The tide was running in high and full. Where the first bold bluff jutted out, a distance of some six yards, the sliding foam already lapped the rock. Once around the turn of the bluff, the beach lay before her—a long white, empty sweep under black cliffs.

She rode at an easy canter, breathing in the stinging salt air, looking out upon the water, where the dark “seaward line” swung with the swell a mile out in “the channel.” She had lost the choking tears, the despair of her first rush down the Monticito road. She felt not happy, but wildly at liberty. The wind took her hat, and she laughed, seeing it spin down the beach. The tingling breeze in her hair whipped out the short, springy curls. The high animal spirits that had helped her over situations where a less vital woman would have been overwhelmed had begun to reassert themselves in the exercise and open air. She scanned the empty beach perspective. What a gallop to the far point! She touched the mare, then pulled her up sharply in the first bound. The beach was not empty. Some one was riding—perhaps a quarter of a mile in front of her—imperfectly to be distinguished among the scattered rocks.

Her first thought was “Walter!” Trembling with eagerness, she peered under a sheltering hand. The rider was a woman. In the revulsion of her feeling, Blanche’s disappointment was an inarticulate sound. All her misery was back upon her. Who it was, riding slowly down the beach in a direction similar to her own, did not matter. She only wanted to avoid being seen—hatless, red-eyed, wild—by this woman, who, being a woman, was her natural enemy. She rode slowly, cautiously, hoping the other would quicken her pace, and put the next point between them. The sun had fallen into the fog, from under which the ocean thundered sullen, gray, up the shore.

Blanche wanted to get around the next point before dusk. She saw the horse in front—bright sorrel on the yellowish-white sand—drawing slowly near the black shoulder of rock; finally, fairly at the turn of it. In an instant it would be out of sight. No, it had stopped; stood motionless a full minute; then, to the girl’s intense amazement, wheeled and came back down the beach at a quick lope. There seemed something of vexation in the sharp turn-about.

Had the woman seen, and come back to speak with her? Blanche wondered. There was no avoiding the meeting. Shaking her hair over her eyes, she rode forward. As the rider drew nearer, with a contraction of heart she recognized Lillian Gueste. At the same instant she knew that Lillian had not seen her.

Mrs. Gueste’s face wore a preoccupied, a vexed, a vaguely anxious, look. The sand half quenched the sound of the horse’s coming. They were almost abreast before she saw Blanche Remi, and then it was with a start, a stare of keen surprise, of interrogation, that effaced the first expression.

Blanche knew whom the questioning eyes missed. There was about them a subtle, tantalizing suggestion of Walter, and she felt the blood run in her temples as she bent her head in faint recognition.

Mrs. Gueste stopped.

“Where is my brother?” she said. She fairly challenged the other with it. That she did not name him Mr. Carter was a mark of her extreme surprise, alarm; for Blanche Remi, with discolored eyes, disheveled hair, and the red stains across her face, looked wild enough to have thrust a displeasing lover into the sea.

Blanche looked at and realized how she hated this woman, this unruffled perfection. The strength of her feeling frightened herself. But her voice was as cool as Mrs. Gueste’s.

“I have no idea,” she said, politely insolent, and made to go on.

Lillian Gueste’s sharp scrutiny had taken in all the girl’s misery, and supposed a scene. Her idea of what had been Walter’s part in it made her, with a revulsion of relief, almost amiable.

“You can’t get around that way,” she said, looking over her shoulder at the point. The vexation was back on her face. “The tide is in.”

The girl’s eye ranged back along the beach. The black cliffs seemed suddenly to have marched seaward.

“Well, you can’t get back that way,” she said. “The water was up to the second point when I came through an hour ago—it’s over the quicksand.”

“Quicksand?” Lillian looked at her blankly. “Then what can we do?”

“Get around there,” said Blanche, waving back to the near point.

“We can’t.” Irritation and unbelief were in Mrs. Gueste’s voice.

“I’ve done it before. It’s easy. Come on.” Blanche was nonchalant in the face of the encroaching sea. The gulls were screaming above their heads, the sound of shattering water was in their ears, as they rode forward.

At the shoulder of the point the wind met them, and the inrush of the ocean. Here the beach sloped suddenly. The cliffs came out in a convex sweep of several rods, with a sharp jut of rock thrust out from the midst of it, like a fish’s fin. Over it, up to the cliff face, the water fawned and leaped, and in its sucking recoil left bare for an instant a narrow neck of sand.

Blanche looked at the bulging bluff, the sharp rock. That made it bad. One could not make a straight dash—would have to make an angle—out and then back; and a moment’s hesitation at the turn—well, it wouldn’t do to meet the ebb there. Blanche knew the strength of the undertow.

With her eyes on the rising and receding water, she made a rapid calculation for the best moment to go in. She was excited, eager for the enterprise. She was surprised at the other woman’s pallor.

“We can’t get through there,” Lillian Gueste said, half angrily. She looked small, pale, impotent, among the severities of waves and sky.

“Then where?” Blanche slid lightly from her saddle.

“If we should shout——” Lillian began.

Blanche almost laughed at her. Did this woman expect to be rescued? Blanche’s experience had been that people in bad places had to get themselves out.

“Up on the cliff you couldn’t hear a cannon fired down here,” she said. “We can get through, only you must not be afraid.” She began loosening the lower hooks of her habit bodice.

“What are you going to do?” Lillian asked, nervously. She felt fearful of what might happen next in these strange, perilous conditions.

“Take off my skirt. Better do the same. Then if a wave gets you you can use your legs.”

Lillian looked at her in horror. “Oh, no!” she said, feeling somehow insulted.

“It’s dangerous,” said Blanche, swinging into her saddle man-fashion. In her boots and spurs, with her wide shoulders and narrow hips, she looked a beautiful boy. “You’d better be astride, anyway,” she said.

“I can keep my saddle.” Lillian’s mouth twitched nervously. “Shall I go first?” she said. Blanche saw her hand on the rein tremble. In her excitement at the trick of the sea she had merged her personal attitude toward Lillian.

“No, follow me, and do as I do. Wait until the wave breaks, and go out with it. Then when you turn at the rock you won’t have the ebb against you. You’ll go up with the flow. It’s perfectly safe. But you must not hesitate a minute. When I shout, dash!”

The breakers were coming in high and quick. The neck of sand next the cliff was seen only momently. The nose of rock was perpetually in a boil of water.

Blanche waited, let the great seventh wave go by, and in the midst of the surge of its recoil dashed in. She felt the mare stagger as the tow took her. A swift, terrible force seized and snatched her seaward. She was swept along like a drift. Then, almost touching the point of rock, she was relinquished. With the roar of the next breaker sounding fairly upon her, she spurred savagely. The mare plunged with a boil of water to her knees, with a wake of white behind her. She went up the beach with the spray of the driving ocean in her hair. She wheeled and waved to the woman on the other side.

Through flying foam she could see Lillian Gueste’s face, a little white, a little strained in its composure. Blanche had felt no fear for herself, but now she had a thrill through her body, a withering sensation in her throat, to see Lillian Gueste waiting there, hanging on her word to make the rush. And the haunting semblance of Walter in the fixed eyes——

“Don’t look at the water!” Blanche shouted. “Look at me! Now!” she screamed, to make herself heard above the breaking wave. But the horse and rider hesitated before the recoil of it; came on, seemed to hover on the brink of it.

“Go back!” Blanche shouted, with frantic gesticulation. The ebb was racing out. Lillian wavered, now fairly in; then the sorrel floundered out, belly deep in the surge. Now the girl saw him close upon the point of rock—now suddenly dragged out from it. A yard of fretted water heaved between. Blanche sat as if hypnotized, with the sight of a struggling horse and rider black etched on the green water. It rushed over her all at once who it was the ebb was taking out, and she was motionless. She saw the rider’s face turned landward with the stark stare of the drowning appealing to her with Walter’s eyes. The next moment she was in deep water. She breasted the current with a rush. She saw a horse, with empty saddle, struggling, swimming, drifting out; saw a swash of black tumble in the twisting tides that sucked it seaward. She made a plunge and seized a skirt. Her fingers held a flow of hair. Threshing hands caught at her stirrup. A body sprang tense to her lift. Then the sea had them again.

Eyes, ears, lungs, full of it. Blanche felt the mare gallantly struggling to keep footing; the steep sand seemed slipping away from under them. Then, with a roar, the dark parted. She gasped in the air. She saw Lillian’s face wax white at her knee. She had not strength to lift more than the head and shoulders as she trailed the limp figure up the beach.

Her knees tottered as she slid from the saddle. Her ears were ringing. Or was some one, somewhere, really calling to her? A cart was plunging and bouncing down the grassy tussocks that dip from the coast road to the beach.

“Oh, Blair!” She cried the driver’s name in a burst of relief.

“That you, Blanche?” He had jumped out of the cart and was running toward her. He saw the drenched figure on the sand.

“My Lord! Mrs. Gueste!”

Blanche’s clutch on his arm hurt him. “Oh, is she dead?” she entreated him.

“Not by a good deal.” He gave his flask to Blanche, and rolled his carriage robe around Lillian. Then he stripped off his mackintosh. “Here, girl,” he said, and Blanche thrust her arms into the sleeves.

“Saw you down there,” he said, lifting the unconscious woman’s dead weight into the cart. His voice was matter-of-course, but his look said she was magnificent.

“Hurry, hurry!” Blanche implored. “Take her over to the Crosbys’, Blair! Oh, quick!”

“Well, come on, then. I’ll whirl you over in a jiffy.”

“Oh, I’m going home—I’ll ride. I’m all right,” she said, through chattering teeth. “But she might—and Mr. Carter——”

“But, girl——”

“Oh, go, go!” She lifted herself into the saddle. Weak as she was, her nervous excitement carried her up.

“And mind, Blair, don’t say anything—if you love me!” She almost laughed the last words at him. Then she was off.

She chose not to take the boulevard, but cut through the town by lanes and side streets, where in the dusk of gathering night and inclosing fog her dripping horse, her drenched habit, would escape observation. She shook with nervous excitement, but the fast riding kept the blood pounding in her veins. She had no power to think coherently of what had happened. She had seen Blair Hemming lift Lillian Gueste into his cart, but the idea possessed her that Lillian had gone out in the tide, and drowned with that terrible face looking back to land, with Walter’s eyes.

She urged the exhausted horse cruelly because the face seemed to stare at her out of the dark street ends. She seemed to look from the surface of things into an abyss of possibility. She felt afraid of herself as something horrible.

But as she turned into the drive between the ghostly acacias returned the little, concrete fear lest she be seen by anyone, most of all her mother. There were lights in the drawing-room windows that looked out on the drive oval, and Blanche cautiously took the far side, to be screened by the feathery palms.

Leaving the mare at the stable, and money in the stableman’s hand, she stole tiptoe up the side stair. Once in her room, she stripped, bathed, rubbed her damp hair dry, tossed it up gleaming on the crown of her head, and, still in her glow and shiver of excitement, hooked herself into a black lace dinner gown glittering with jet, fastened a diamond crescent over her bosom, and swept in upon her mother and maiden aunt, who were patiently, resignedly, dining without the belated equestrienne.

“Why, darling!” her mother murmured, in gratified amazement. Blanche seldom bothered to dress for dinner, and to-night she seemed almost too dazzling to be real. She was surprised herself at the extent to which her bravado covered what had happened. Inwardly she was quaking. Her ears were alert for every sound.

“Did you have a nice time?” her mother asked her.

“Oh, lovely!” said Blanche, with a shiver.

“Where did you go?”

“Down the beach.” Blanche started. Her hand poised halfway to an olive. She heard what her ears had been pricking for—horses’ feet on the gravel drive.

With an effort she held herself quiet.

The Spanish maid opened the dining-room door. “Some one to see you, seÑora.”

Blanche, who had half risen, sank back in her chair.

“Why, who can it be?” Mrs. Remi was murmuring as she went into the hall.

Blanche sat listening, lips apart. She heard her mother exclaim; then a man’s voice exclaimed; she knew the voice; she rose. Her heart seemed beating in her throat. She heard her mother’s voice, perplexed, emphatic: “But she’s all right; she’s very well. There’s some mistake!”

Then Walter Carter’s, insisting: “But they were both in the water. Hemming saw her bring Lillian out. He drove my sister home. How could Blanche——” When she burst upon them.

“Walter!” The sight of him, wild-haired, pale, his mackintosh over his evening clothes, his general look of catastrophe, struck her with only one significance.

“Mrs. Gueste?” she gasped. “How is she?”

For a moment Walter could only stare at her, dazed. He had seen his sister—drenched, disheveled, white, unconscious—carried into the house. And here stood Blanche, vital, vigorous, self-possessed, groomed for a function.

“My God, no—it was you!” he stammered. “But—but is there any mistake?”

The soft sound of the dining-room door closing left them alone face to face. He came toward her. She stepped back.

“There’s no mistake. At least, we were in the water, and she was afraid.”

“But Hemming said she was washed out of the saddle—and the tow took her out, and you went after her and got her!” He still came toward her. It was hard to look him in the face, for the bewildered eyes reminded her of Lillian Gueste’s look when the tide took her out from the rocks. Blanche felt her bravado running out at her finger ends.

“But I didn’t—— I—I—oh, Walter, you don’t know what I did!” She faltered and sobbed. She leaned against the hatrack and buried her face in the folds of a coat.

“Why, child, you simply saved her!” His arms were around her, and he tried to pull the cloak from her face. “She wants to see you to-morrow. She wants to tell you——”

“Oh, no; I can’t. She wouldn’t if she knew——” Blanche’s voice was muffled on his shoulder.

“Well, what?” he muttered, his lips against her cheek.

The answer reached him, a half smothered, almost contented whisper:

“How I hated her!”