sence of some months? No matter it was exquisite in every detail.
Curious, her coming here and waiting after she had learned that you were
out, was it not; from nine o'clock--that fateful hour!--to-night."

"I think she must have felt--lonely," said Phyllis. "She seemed so glad
to see me--so relieved. She meant to stay with me all night, poor thing!
Oh, why should her husband stay away from her for months at a time? It
is quite disgraceful!"

"I think that we had better go to bed," said her father. "If we begin
to discuss abstract questions of temperament we may abandon all hope
of sleep tonight. We might as well try to fathom Herbert Courtland's
reasons for going to yacht with so uncongenial a party as Lord
Earlscourt's. Good-night, my dear!"

He kissed her and went upstairs. She did not follow him immediately.
She stood in the center of the room, and over her sweet face a puzzled
expression crept, as a single breath of wind passes over the smooth
surface of a lake on a day when no wind stirs a leaf.

She thought first of Herbert Courtland, which of itself was a curious
incident. How did it come that he had yielded so easily to the
invitation of Lord Earlscourt to accompany him on his cruise in the
yacht _Water Nymph_? (Lord Earlscourt's imagination in the direction of
the nomenclature of his boats as well as his horses was not unlimited.)

But this was just the question which her father had suggested as an
example of a subject of profitless discussion. She remembered this, and
asked herself if it was likely that she, having at her command fewer
data than her father bearing upon this case, should make a better
attempt than he made at its solution. Her father had seen Herbert
Courtland since he had agreed to go on the cruise, and was therefore in
the better position to arrive at a reasonable conclusion in regard to
the source of the impulse upon which Mr. Courtland had acted; so much
she thought certain. And yet her father had suggested the profitless
nature of such an investigation, and her father was certainly right.

Only for a single moment did it occur to her that something she had
said to Herbert Courtland when he was sitting there, there in that chair
beside her, might have had its influence upon him--only for a single
moment, however; then she shook her head.

No, no! that supposition was too, too ridiculous to be entertained for
a moment. He had, to be sure, shown that he felt deeply the words which
she