n at the piano
between charming bits of a classic ballad which he was inclined to sing:

"I'd share my pottage
With you, dear, but
True love in a cottage
Is hell in a hut."

"Is that you, Stephanie?" he asked, as a dark figure, seated on the
veranda, turned a shadowy head toward him.

"Yes. Isn't this starlight magnificent? I've been up to the nursery
looking at the infant wonder--just wild to hug him; but he's asleep, and
his nurse glared at me. So I thought I'd come and look at something else
as unattainable--the stars, Louis," she added, laughing--"not you."

"Sure," he said, smiling, "I'm always obtainable. Unlike the infant upon
whom you had designs," he added, "I'm neither asleep nor will any nurse
glare at you if you care to steal a kiss from me."

"I've no inclination to transfer my instinctively maternal transports to
you," she said, serenely, "though, maternal solicitude might not be
amiss concerning you."

"Do you think I need moral supervision?"

"Not by me."

"By whom?"

"Ask me an easier one, Louis. And--I didn't _say_ you needed it at all,
did I?"

He sat beside her, silent, head lifted, examining the stars.

"I'm going back on the midnight," he remarked, casually.

"Oh, I'm sorry!" she exclaimed, with her winning frankness.

"I'm--there's something I have to attend to in town--"

"Work?"

"It has to do with my work--indirectly--"

She glanced sideways at him, and remained for a moment curiously
observant.

"How is the work going, anyway?" she asked.

He hesitated. "I've apparently come up slap against a blank wall. It
isn't easy to explain how I feel--but I've no confidence in myself--"

"_You_! No confidence? How absurd!"

"It's true," he said a little sullenly.

"You are having a spasm of progressive development," she said, calmly.
"You take it as a child takes teething--with a squirm and a mental howl
instead of a physical yell."

He laughed. "I suppose it's something of that sort. But there's more--a
self-distrust amounting to self-disgust at moments.... Stephanie, I
_want_ to do something good--"

"You have--dozens of times."

"People say so. The world forgets what is really good--" he made a
nervous gesture--"always before us poor twentieth-century men looms the
goal guarded by the vast, austere, menacing phantoms of the Masters."

[Illustration: "'I know it is _you_. Is it?'"]

"Nobody ever won a race looking behind him," she Said, gaily; "let 'em
m