porch of a summer evening, the three of them about him, and he had
seemed to enjoy talking. He certainly could not be wholly occupied with
the machine, for at no time did he let the engine out for what it could
do, but contented himself with a steady, moderate pace very different
from the sort of furious speed in which he and the Green Imp were
accustomed to indulge when occasion offered. Altogether he presented to
the girl a problem which she could not solve and was never further from
solving than during the seventy-five miles she sat beside him on the run
home.

"You're all to come in and have an ice-cool, salad-y supper with us,"
Mrs. Macauley declared as the car turned in at the home driveway. "Hot
coffee, too, if you want it--or even beefsteak if you prefer. But I
thought since it was so hot--"

"I'll take the beefsteak," announced Burns over his shoulder, "if I find
nothing urgent for, me to do. If there's a call--"

"If there is, make it, and you shall have the beefsteak when you get
back," Martha promised him. Mrs. Macauley was of the sort of young
married woman who delights to make her friends comfortable--and none
better than Red Pepper, who was her husband's most valued friend, as he
was that of his neighbour on the other side, Arthur Chester.

To everybody's regret the call was waiting, and as the party went in
to supper they waved their hands at the Green Imp flying away down the
road. It was not till long after the "ice-cool, salad-y supper" was
ended and the women, freshly clad, were sitting on the porch again, the
men smoking on the steps below them, that tine Green Imp came back.

Ten minutes later a large figure crossed the lawn at a pace which
suggested both reluctance and fatigue.

"If it hadn't been for that beefsteak--" Burns began.

"You wouldn't have come," finished Macauley. "Oh, we know that! Go in
and get it, Red, and perhaps afterward the charms of human society will
have their inning."

Whether or not the beefsteak made the difference, a change had taken
place when R. P. Burns at length returned to the comforts of the porch.
He threw himself upon a crimson cushion on the upper step, precisely at
the feet, as it chanced, of Ellen Lessing. As he leaned comfortably back
against the porch pillar he looked directly up into her face, his eyes
meeting hers with an odd, searching expression as if he now saw her for
the first time. Pauline, gazing enviously across, saw the black eyes
meet