it began. For the next month, until Milly, having exhausted the
social possibilities of Mackinac, had to move on to another "resort" in
Wisconsin, she saw a great deal of Edgar Duncan. They walked through the
fir woods by moonlight, boated on the lake under the stars, and read
Milly's literary efforts on the piazza of the Thornton cottage. Duncan
told her much about his ranch on the slope of the Ventura hills above
the Pacific, of the indolent California life in the sunshine, with an
occasional excursion to Los Angeles or San Francisco. He was not
exciting in any sense, not very energetic, like the Chicago men she had
known, perhaps not very much alive; but he was gentle, and kindly, and
thoughtful for women, of a refined and high-minded race--the sort of man
"any woman could be sure of."

Mrs. Thornton, with much sisterly affection and no vulgar ambition,
encouraged unobtrusively the intimacy. "Edgar is so lonely out there on
his ranch," she explained to Milly, "I want him to come back east. He
might now, you know,--there's nothing really the matter with his health.
But he's got used to the life and doesn't like our hurry and the
scramble for money. Besides he's put all his money into those lemons and
olives.... I think a woman might be very happy out of the world in a
place like that, with a man who loved her a lot,--and children, of
course, children,--don't you?"

Milly thought so, too. She was becoming very tired of newspaper work,
and of her single woman's struggle to maintain herself in the roar of
Chicago. The future looked rather gray even through her habitually
rose-colored glasses. She was twenty-four. She knew the social game, and
its risks, better than two years before.... So she was very kind to
Duncan,--she really liked him extremely, rather for what he was without
than for what he had,--and when she left it was understood between them
that the Californian should return to his ranch by the way of Chicago
and meet Milly there on a certain day,--Monday, the first of September.
He was very particular, sentimentally so, about this date,--kept
repeating it,--and they made little jokes of it until Milly even
particularized the hour when she could be free to see him,--"Five
o'clock, 31 East Acacia Street,--hadn't you better write it down?" But
Duncan thought he could remember it very well. "We'll go somewhere for
dinner," Milly promised.

That was all, but it was a good deal for the shy Edgar Duncan to have
a