under his
breath, more to himself than to her. But it was to her he added,
teasingly and a little lingeringly: "Unless, of course, one were waiting
for someone to catch up with one."

She smiled without turning to him; watching her, the thought found its
way up through the proprieties of his mind that it would be worth
waiting a long time if, after the wait, one could go over the hills and
far away with a girl through whom life glowed as he could see it glowed
in this girl; no, not with a girl like this--boldly, humorously and a
little tenderly he amended in his mind--but with _this_ girl.

She wheeled about. "I must go back," she said abruptly. "This dance is
with Will Blair--I must go back. I'll have a hard enough time," she
laughed, a little nervously, "making it right with Louis Stephens."

"I'll tell him I heard it was an extra," he said.

She halted, looking up at him. "Did you hear that!" she demanded.

He seemed about to say some light thing, but that died away. "I wanted
the dance," was his quiet reply.

CHAPTER SEVEN

It was a June evening a year later that Stuart Williams sat on the steps
of the porch that ran round the side of his house, humoring the fox
terrier who thought human beings existed to throw sticks for dogs. After
a while the man grew tired of that theory of human existence, and bade
the panting Fritz lie down on the step below him. From there Fritz would
look up to his master appealingly, eyes and tail saying, "Now let's
begin again." But he got no response, so, in philosophic dog fashion,
soon stretched out for a snooze.

The man was less philosophic: he had not that gift of turning from what
he wanted to what he could have.

A little later he would go to the rehearsal of the out-of-door play the
Country Club was getting ready to give. Ruth Holland would be there: she
too was in the play. Probably he would take her home, for they lived in
the same neighborhood and a little apart from the others. It was Mrs.
Lawrence who, the night of the first rehearsal, commented with relief
for one more thing smoothly arranged upon their going the same way.

For five weeks now they had been going the same way; their talk on those
homeward walks had been the lightest of talk, for the most part a
laughing over things that had happened during the rehearsal. And yet the
whole world had become newly alive, until tonight it seemed a tremulous,
waiting world. That light talk had been little more t