at its
zenith.

Mrs. Delarayne had been down at Brineweald a little under a week;
Vanessa Vollenberg and the young Fearwells had already been of the party
four whole days; Sir Joseph with Denis Malster and Guy Tyrrell, Mr. and
Mrs. Gerald Tribe and Miss Mallowcoid had arrived at Brineweald Park
twenty-four hours after the Delarayne household had been completed, and
now everybody was busy settling down to the novelty of life, effacing
the traces of strangeness wherever they appeared, and measuring each
other's skill and power at pastimes not necessarily confined to
swimming, golf, and tennis.

Leonetta had been congratulated on her friend Vanessa. Mrs. Delarayne
who had expected an over-dressed, heavy young lady, with Shylock
countenance and shaggy negroid coiffure, had been not a little surprised
when she saw alight on the Brineweald down platform a girl who, though
distinctly Semitic in features, had all the refinement, good taste, and
sobriety of a Gentile and a lady. It was a relief, to say the least, and
when, in addition, she found her intelligent and a lively companion, she
was devoutly thankful.

Nothing beneath that fierce August sun escaped the keen comprehending
eye of Vanessa Vollenberg. The mother and the two daughters with whom
she found her present lot cast, gave her food enough for meditation and
secret comment; but while their acumen and penetration were hardly
inferior to her own, she felt an adult among people not completely grown
up. It was as if they still retained more of the ingenuousness of
primitive womanhood than she, and thus she "circumnavigated" them, while
they, all too self-centred, had barely discovered in which hemisphere
her shores were to be found. In this way the seniority of her race was
probably revealed.

Beautiful in her own Oriental style, voluptuous and graceful, with small
well-made hands, and shapely limbs, she might have proved a formidable
rival to Leonetta; or was it perhaps precisely her Jewish blood,--which
seemed in Leonetta's eyes to preclude rivalry,--that had first endeared
this attractive young Jewess to her wilful Gentile friend?

Girls have strange reasons for "falling in love" with each other at
school. It is not impossible that the inconceivability of eventual
rivalry should be one of these.

Mrs. Delarayne's house, "The Fastness," was one of a round dozen large
houses that stood along the crest of Brineweald Hill, overlooking the
little seaside town of St