she would manage to feel Mary
Ogden under the constant bombardment of a name that was a title in more
ways than one. But he might have trusted her to manage it!'

In the afternoon Mrs. Minor suggested having tea in the woods, and they
all walked--single file--five miles to drink their tea and eat their
cakes (Larsing carrying the paraphernalia) in a pine grove on the
summit of a hill, and then walked back again, clamoring for supper.
Mary had been monopolized by Scores and Bolton, occasionally
vouchsafing Clavering a glance. During the evening they were all too
pleasantly tired and replete to dance or to play the charades they had
planned, but lay about comfortably, listening to a concert of alternate
arias and jazz. Clavering did not have a word alone with Mary. She
sat on one of the divans between Gora and Todd, while Scores lay on the
floor at her feet, his head on a cushion, one foot waving over a lifted
knee, the perfect picture of the contented playwright. They kept up a
continuous murmur, punctuated with gales of laughter. Clavering had
sulkily taken a chair beside Babette Gold, whose metallic humor
sometimes amused him, but she went sound asleep before his eyes, and he
could only gaze into the fire and console himself with visions of a
week hence, when these cursed people had gone and he was the most
fortunate man on earth.

His room was downstairs next to Mr. Dinwiddie's, and he made up his
mind to let himself out softly at midnight, throw pebbles at her window
and whisper to her as she leaned from her casement. It was a scene
that if introduced into a modern play would have driven him from the
theatre and tipped his pen with vitriol next morning, but it appealed
to him, somehow, as a fitting episode in his own high romance. But he
was asleep before his head touched the pillow, and did not lift an
eyelash until the first bell roused him at seven o'clock. Then,
however, he lay for some time thinking, soberly.

XLIX

The hour between seven and eight was a lively one in the upper
corridor. There was only one bathroom on the second floor. Scores and
Miss Gold took their morning plunge in the lake, but the rest preferred
the less drastic shower, and there was a continual darting to and fro
of forms clad in bath-robe or kimono; the vanquished peeping through
door-cracks waiting for the bathroom door to open--signal for another
wild rush down the hall, a scuffle at the door, a triumphant slam and