nd call, solitude or
company.

Lady Clifton-Wyatt came down for a week-end and struck up a great
friendship with the majestic Mrs. Prothero from Washington, D. C., so
grand a lady that even Lady C.-W. was a bit in awe of her, so gracious
a personage that even Lady C.-W. could not pick a quarrel with her.

Mrs. Prothero gathered Marie Louise under her wing and urged her to
visit her when she came to America. But Polly Widdicombe had already
pledged Marie Louise to make her home her own on that side of the sea.
Polly came down, too, and had "the time of her young life" in doing a
bit of the women's war work that became the beautiful fashion of the
time. The justification of it was that it released men for the
trenches, but Polly insisted that it was shamefully good sport.

She and Marie Louise went about in breeches and shirts and worked like
hostlers around the stables and in the paddocks, breaking colts and
mucking out stalls. They donned the blouses and boots of peasants, and
worked in the fields with rake and hoe and harrow. They even tried the
plow, but they followed it too literally, and the scallopy furrows
they drew across the fields made the yokels laugh or grieve, according
to their natures.

The photographers were alive to the piquancy of these revelations, and
portraits of Marie Louise in knickers and puttees, and armed with
agricultural weapons, appeared in the pages of all the weeklies along
with other aristocrats and commoners. Some of these even reached
America.

There was just one flaw for Rosalind in this "As You Like It" life and
that was the persistence of the secret association with Nicky. It was
the strangest of clandestine affairs.

Marie Louise had always liked to get out alone in a saddle or behind
the wheel of a runabout, and Sir Joseph, when he came up from town,
fell into the habit of asking her once in a while to take another
little note to Nicky.

She found him in out-of-the-way places. He would step from a clump of
bushes by the road and hail her car, or she would overtake him and
offer him a lift to his inn, or she would take horse and gallop across
country and find him awaiting her in some lonely avenue or in the
twist of a ravine.

He was usually so preoccupied and furtive that he made no proffer of
courtship; but once when he seemed peculiarly triumphant he rode so
close to her that their knees girded and their spurs clashed, and he
tried to clip her in his arms. She gathered