to
make allowances for the fact that at such times poor Agatha was
unavoidably a little cross and pessimistic?

V

Yet Colonel Musgrave strolled into his garden, later, with a tolerable
affectation of unconcern. Women, after all, he assured himself, were
necessary for the perpetuation of the species; and, resolving for the
future to view these weakly, big-hipped and slope-shouldered makeshifts
of Nature's with larger tolerance, he cocked his hat at a
devil-may-carish angle, and strode up the walk, whistling jauntily and
having, it must be confessed, to the unprejudiced observer very much the
air of a sheep in wolf's clothing.

"At worst," he was reflecting, "I can make love to her. They, as a rule,
take kindlily enough to that; and in the exercise of hospitality a host
must go to all lengths to divert his guests. Failure is not
permitted...."

Then She came to him.

She came to him across the trim, cool lawn, leisurely, yet with a
resilient tread that attested the vigor of her slim young body. She was
all in white, diaphanous, ethereal, quite incredibly incredible; but as
she passed through the long shadows of the garden--fire-new, from the
heart of the sunset, Rudolph Musgrave would have sworn to you,--the lacy
folds and furbelows and semi-transparencies that clothed her were now
tinged with gold, and now, as a hedge or flower-bed screened her from
the horizontal rays, were softened into multitudinous graduations of
grays and mauves and violets.

"Failure is not permitted," he was repeating in his soul....

"You're Cousin Rudolph, aren't you?" she asked. "How perfectly
entrancing! You see until to-day I always thought that if I had been
offered the choice between having cousins or appendicitis I would have
preferred to be operated on."

And Rudolph Musgrave noted, with a delicious tingling somewhere about
his heart, that her hair was really like the reflection of a sunset in
rippling waters,--only many times more beautiful, of course,--and that
her mouth was an inconsiderable trifle, a scrap of sanguine curves, and
that her eyes were purple glimpses of infinity.

Then he observed that his own mouth was giving utterance to divers
irrelevant and foolish sounds, which eventually resolved themselves into
the statement he was glad to see her. And immediately afterward the
banality of this remark brought the hot blood to his face and, for the
rest of the day, stung him and teased him, somewhere in the ba