perished? It was six o'clock before they
began the return drive; at seven they were passing the Country Club, and,
of course, they dined there and joined in the little informal dance
afterwards; and later, supper and cooling drinks in a corner of the
veranda, with the moon streaming upon them and the enchanted breath of
the forest enchaining the senses.

What a day! How obligingly all unpleasant thoughts fled! How high and
bright rose the mountains all round the horizon of the present, shutting
out yesterday and to-morrow! "This has been _the_ happy day of my life,"
said Ross as they lingered behind the other two on the way to the last
'bus for the town. "The happiest"--in a lower tone--"thus far."

And Del was sparkling assent, encouragement even; and her eyes were
gleaming defiantly at the only-too-plainly-to-be-read faces of the few
hilltop people still left at the club house. "Surely a woman has the
right to enjoy herself innocently in the twentieth century," she was
saying to herself. "Dory wouldn't want me to sit moping alone. I am
young; I'll have enough of that after I'm old--one is old so much longer
than young." And she looked up at Ross, and very handsome he was in that
soft moonlight, his high-blazing passion glorifying his features. "I,
too, have been happy," she said to him. Then, with a vain effort to seem
and to believe herself at ease, "I wish Dory could have been along."

But Ross was not abashed by the exorcism of that name; her bringing it in
was too strained, would have been amusing if passion were not devoid of
the sense of humor. "She _does_ care for me!" he was thinking dizzily.
"And I can't live without her--and _won't_!"

His mother had been writing him her discoveries that his father, in
wretched health and goaded by physical torment to furious play at the
green tables of "high finance," was losing steadily, swiftly, heavily.
But Ross read her letters as indifferently as he read Theresa's appeals
to him to come to Windrift. It took a telegram--"Matters much worse than
I thought. You must be here to talk with him before he begins business
to-morrow"--to shock him into the realization that he had been imperiling
the future he was dreaming of and planning--his and Del's future.

On the way to the train he stopped at the Villa d'Orsay, saw her and
Henrietta at the far end of Mrs. Dorsey's famed white-and-gold garden.
Henrietta was in the pavilion reading. A few yards away Adelaide, head
bent a