Two weeks at Kensington will put me right."

"Two weeks nothing! See here, if you act up, I'll rope you and hustle
you out to the ranch and close herd you there for about six months."

She smiled weakly at him.

"I shall be all right, dear--but you can help me upstairs now."

"Too tired for a roof garden?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Or a broiled lobster?"

"Not to-night, dear."

He helped her up the stairs, alternately scolding her for her weakness
and protesting that broiled lobsters were all that kept him from
forgetting the existence of Manhattan.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE LITTLE LAND

Ewing found Kensington like a village dropped from the clouds of
stageland, its wide, grass-bordered streets arched with giant elms and
flanked by square old houses, drowsing behind their flower gardens and
green lawns. The house to which he went was equally a stage house. Only
in that land of pretense had he seen its like: a big, square, gray
house, its drab slate roof and red chimneys all but hidden by the elms
that towered above it like mammoth feather dusters, its wide piazzas
screened from the street by a hoary hedge of lilac. The house seemed to
drowse in a comfortable lethargy, confident of the rectitude of builders
long dead who had roughhewn its beams and joined them with wooden pins
before a day of nails. In Ewing's own room, far up between the hunched
shoulders of the house, the windows gave closely on one of the elms, so
that he could hear its whispers night and morning from his canopied bed
of four posts. The other rooms were broad and low of ceiling, and there
were long, high-backed sofas, slim-legged chairs, and tables of mahogany
or rosewood, desks, cabinets, and highboys of an outlandish grace, that
charmed with hints of a mellowed past--of past overlaying past in
sleeping strata.

The woman whose house this was seemed to Ewing to be its true spirit.
She, too, drowsed anciently, a thing of old lace and lavender, yet of a
certain gentle and antique sprightliness, of cheeks preserving a hint of
time-worn pink, mellowed like the scrap of her flowered wedding dress
shut between the leaves of an "Annual" half a century old.

And Ewing found in the house, too, the girl who had once talked half
an hour with him by an exigent tea table. She had been a thing of shy
restraint then, showing with an almost old-fashioned simplicity
against her background of townish sophistication. Now he found her
demurely modern in thi