the requisite foil to an evening of scented
breezes and tranquil talk. They had been married more than a year,
and each home-coming still reflected the freshness of their first day
together. If, indeed, their happiness had a flaw, it was in resembling
too closely the bright impermanence of their surroundings. Their love as
yet was but the gay tent of holiday-makers.

His wife looked up with a smile. The country life suited her, and her
beauty had gained depth from a stillness in which certain faces might
have grown opaque.

"Are you very tired?" she asked, pouring his tea.

"Just enough to enjoy this." He rose from the chair in which he had
thrown himself and bent over the tray for his cream. "You've had a
visitor?" he commented, noticing a half-empty cup beside her own.

"Only Mr. Flamel," she said, indifferently.

"Flamel? Again?"

She answered without show of surprise. "He left just now. His yacht is
down at Laurel Bay and he borrowed a trap of the Dreshams to drive over
here."

Glennard made no comment, and she went on, leaning her head back against
the cushions of her bamboo-seat, "He wants us to go for a sail with him
next Sunday."

Glennard meditatively stirred his tea. He was trying to think of the
most natural and unartificial thing to say, and his voice seemed to come
from the outside, as though he were speaking behind a marionette. "Do
you want to?"

"Just as you please," she said, compliantly. No affectation of
indifference could have been as baffling as her compliance. Glennard, of
late, was beginning to feel that the surface which, a year ago, he
had taken for a sheet of clear glass, might, after all, be a mirror
reflecting merely his own conception of what lay behind it.

"Do you like Flamel?" he suddenly asked; to which, still engaged with
her tea, she returned the feminine answer--"I thought you did."

"I do, of course," he agreed, vexed at his own incorrigible tendency to
magnify Flamel's importance by hovering about the topic. "A sail would
be rather jolly; let's go."

She made no reply and he drew forth the rolled-up evening papers which
he had thrust into his pocket on leaving the train. As he smoothed them
out his own countenance seemed to undergo the same process. He ran his
eye down the list of stocks and Flamel's importunate personality receded
behind the rows of figures pushing forward into notice like so many
bearers of good news. Glennard's investments were flowering like his