k. Perhaps, if she had not been
hypersensitive to-night,--in an impossible mood for any sort of party
really--she might have failed to detect the familiar strain in his
sensible, rather fatherly talk. As it was, she thought she did detect it
and it made her want to scream--or swear!

There is one point to be urged in Baldy's defense that Mary never learned
to allow for. Gin or no gin, the effect of contrast she presented to her
surroundings in a place like this, her look of a seraphic visitor gone
astray, would have given any one the impulse, at least, to rush to the
rescue. To begin with, it was not possible to credit her with the
twenty-five years she truly claimed; nineteen, in a soft colored evening
frock like the one she had on to-night, was about what one would have
guessed. Then, you never would have believed, short of discovering the
fact yourself, how strong she was; her slenderness and the fine
articulation of her joints made her look fragile. Her coloring helped the
illusion along, the clear unsophisticated blue of her eyes, the pallor of
her hair that the petals of a tea-rose could have got lost in,--it was,
literally, just about the tint of unbleached linen--and the pearly
translucence of her skin. If you got the opportunity to look close enough
to see that there wasn't a grain of powder upon it, not even between the
shoulder blades, it made you think of flower petals again. What clenched
the effect was her healthy capacity for complete relaxation when no
effort was required of her. She drooped a little and people thought she
looked tired. She never could see herself like that and never made due
allowance for the effect she produced, invariably upon strangers and not
infrequently upon an old friend.

To-night, she lacked the name to label her mood by, rejecting rather
fiercely the one that kept offering itself. You couldn't be homesick when
home was the last place in the world you wanted to go back to--the place
you were desperately marshaling reasons for staying away from.

It was the non-appearance of her brother, Rush, that had brought a lot of
dispersed feelings to a focus. She had heard nothing later from him than
the letter she referred to when she last wrote to her father. She had
expected a cable and it hadn't come. She had this morning gone over to
Hoboken to meet the transport he had said he expected to sail on, but
having got down to the pier a little late, after the debarkation had
begun, she