" asked the widow, with a challenging
glance from beneath her lashes.

"I can't," grumbled the bachelor, "while you are blowing that chiffon
veil."

The widow took the two ends of the offensive thing and tied them
deliberately under her chin.

"Some day," continued the bachelor, as he swung the canoe shoreward with
a vigorous dip of the paddle, "I'm going to show you who's master. I'm
going to marry you and then--"

"Be sorry!" laughed the widow.

"Of course," assented the bachelor, "but I'd be sorrier--if I didn't."

II

THE WINNING CARD?

"THERE," said the bachelor as he bowed to a little man across the room,
"sits the eighth wonder of the world--a man with a squint and a cork leg
and no income to speak of, who has just married for the third time. What
makes us so fascinating?"

The widow laid down her oyster fork and gazed thoughtfully at the
beautiful girl in blue chiffon sitting opposite the man with the squint.

"Don't generalize," she said, turning rebukingly to the bachelor. "You
mean what makes the little man so fascinating?"

The bachelor jabbed an oyster viciously.

"Well," he grumbled, "what does make him so fascinating? Is it the
squint or the cork----"

The widow looked at him reproachfully.

"Don't be envious," she said. "He might have two squints and yet be
successful with women. Haven't you ever seen a runty, plain little man
before, with nothing on earth, apparently, to recommend him except his
sex, who could draw the women as a magnet does needles?"

The bachelor dropped his oyster and stared at the widow.

"It's hypnotism!" he declared with solemn conviction.

The widow laughed.

"It's nothing of the sort," she contradicted. "It's because he holds
man's winning card and knows how to play it. Just observe the tender
solicitude with which he consults her about that fish."

"You mean," inquired the bachelor suspiciously, "that he has a
fascinating way?"

"That's all he needs," responded the widow promptly, "to make him
irresistible."

"Then, how do you account," argued the bachelor, indicating a
Gibsonesque young man eating his dinner alone under a palm at the corner
table, "for the popularity of that Greek god over there? He's a perfect
boor, yet the women in this hotel pet him and coax him and cuddle him as
if he were a prize lion cub."

"Oh," remarked the widow, "if you were all Greek gods--that would be
different. But, unfortunately, the average man is just an u