dear,
you are like a wraith. What is it?"

"I have a headache," said Patricia. "It is nothing."

"You reassure me," the colonel gaily declared, "for I had feared it was
a heartache--"

She faced him. Desperation looked out of her purple eyes. "It is," the
girl said swiftly.

"Ah--?" Only it was an intake of the breath, rather than an
interjection. Colonel Musgrave ate his fish with deliberation. "Young
Parkinson?" he presently suggested.

"I thought I had forgotten him. I didn't know I cared--I didn't know I
_could_ care so much--" And there was a note in her voice which thrust
the poor colonel into an abyss of consternation.

"Remember that these people are your guests," he said, in perfect
earnest.

"--and I refused him this afternoon for the last time, and he is going
away to-morrow--"

But here Judge Allardyce broke in, to tell Miss Stapylton of the
pleasure with which he had _nolle prosequied_ the case against Tom
Bellingham.

"A son of my old schoolmate, ma'am," the judge explained. "A Bellingham
of Assequin. Oh, indiscreet of course--but, God bless my soul! when were
the Bellinghams anything else? The boy regretted it as much as anybody."

And she listened with almost morbid curiosity concerning the finer
details of legal intricacy.

Colonel Musgrave was mid-course in an anecdote which the lady upon the
other side of him found wickedly amusing.

He was very gay. He had presently secured the attention of the company
at large, and held it through a good half-hour; for by common consent
Rudolph Musgrave was at his best to-night, and Lichfield found his best
worth listening to.

"Grinning old popinjay!" thought Mr. Parkinson; and envied him and
internally noted, and with an unholy fervor cursed, the adroitness of
intonation and the discreetly modulated gesture with which the colonel
gave to every point of his merry-Andrewing its precise value.

The colonel's mind was working busily on matters oddly apart from those
of which he talked. He wanted this girl next to him--at whom he did not
look. He loved her as that whippersnapper yonder was not capable of
loving anyone. Young people had these fancies; and they outlived them,
as the colonel knew of his own experience. Let matters take their course
unhindered, at all events by him. For it was less his part than that of
any other man alive to interfere when Rudolph Musgrave stood within a
finger's reach of, at worst, his own prosperity and happiness.