much like a gauche seventeen-year-old
now. He thought that he would not enjoy playing chess with Mrs.
Severance. She was one of those people who smiled inoffensively at the
end of a game and then said they thought it would really be a little
evener if they gave you both knights.

Ted reassured him though. Ted, stumbling out of the dining-room, with
a mixture of would-be unconcern, compound embarrassment and complete
though suppressed fury at Oliver on his face. It was hardly either just
or moral, Oliver reflected, that Mrs. Severance should be the only one
of them to seem completely at her ease.

"Hello, Ollie," in the tone of "And if you'd only get the hell out as
quickly as possible." "Mrs. Severance--" a stumble over that. "You've
got a letter for me?"

"Yes. It's important," said Oliver as firmly as he could. He gave it,
and, as Ted sat down near a lamp to read it, Oliver saw by one sudden
momentary flash that passed over Mrs. Severance's face that she had seen
the address and known instantly that the handwriting was not that of a
man. And then Oliver began to think that he might have been right
when he had thought of the present expedition as something rather
perilous--he found that he had moved three steps away from Mrs.
Severance without his knowing it, very much as he might have from an
unfamiliar piece of furniture near which he was standing and which had
instantaneously developed all the electric properties of a coil of live
wire. Then he looked at Ted's face--and what he saw there made him want
to kick himself for looking--because it is never proper for even the
friendliest spectator to see a man's private soul stripped naked as a
grass-stalk before his own eyes. It was horribly like watching Ted lose
balance on the edge of a cliff that he had been walking unconcernedly
and start to fall without crying out or any romantic gestures, with only
that look of utter surprise struck into his face and the way his hands
clutched as if they would tear some solid hold out of the air. Oliver
kept his eyes on him in a frosty suspense while he read the letter all
through three times and then folded it and put it carefully away in his
breast pocket--and then when he looked at Mrs. Severance Oliver could
have shouted aloud with immense improper joy, for he knew by the way
Ted's hands moved that they were going back in the car together.

Ted was on his feet and his voice was as grave as if he were
apologizing for having i