eautiful and cultured wife in Greece. "That settles it," he
answered. They came out arm in arm, and Paris, having put on a striped
tennis coat over his short-sleeved Greek tunic, moved round among the
company for their congratulations, Venus ostentatiously showing the
apple she had won.

"I can haydly keep from eating it," she explained to Alice; before whom
she dropped Mavering's arm. "I'm awfully hungry. It's hayd woyk."

Alice stood with her head drawn back, looking at the excited girl with a
smile, in which seemed to hover somewhere a latent bitterness.

Mavering, with a flushed face and a flying tongue, was exchanging
sallies with her mother, who smothered him in flatteries.

Mrs. Trevor came toward the group, and announced supper. "Mr. Paris,
will you take Miss Aphrodite out?"

Miss Anderson swept a low bow of renunciation, and tacitly relinquished
Mavering to Alice.

"Oh, no, no!" said Alice, shrinking back from him, with an
intensification of her uncertain smile. "A mere mortal?"

"Oh, how very good!" said Mrs. Trevor.

There began to be, without any one's intending it, that sort of tacit
misunderstanding which is all the worse because it can only follow upon
a tacit understanding like that which had established itself between
Alice and Mavering. They laughed and joked together gaily about all
that went on; they were perfectly good friends; he saw that she and her
mother were promptly served; he brought them salad and ice-cream and
coffee himself, only waiting officially upon Miss Anderson first, and
Alice thanked him, with the politest deprecation of his devotion; but
if their eyes met, it was defensively, and the security between them was
gone. Mavering vaguely felt the loss, without knowing how to retrieve
it, and it made him go on more desperately with Miss Anderson. He
laughed and joked recklessly, and Alice began to mark a more explicit
displeasure with her. She made her mother go rather early.

On her part, Miss Anderson seemed to find reason for resentment in
Alice's bearing toward her. As if she had said to herself that her frank
loyalty had been thrown away upon a cold and unresponsive nature,
and that her harmless follies in the play had been met with unjust
suspicions, she began to make reprisals, she began in dead earnest to
flirt with Mavering. Before the evening passed she had made him seem
taken with her; but how justly she had done this, and with how much
fault of his, no one could hav