s the dear little children was worth the argument.

Everybody got up, Ted being rather gallant to Mrs. Severance. Oliver
looked worried today, worried and tired. She hoped it wasn't about Nancy
and the engagement. What a miserable thing money was to make so much
difference.

"Mrs. Severance--"

"Mr. Billett--"

Louise's friend was certainly attractive. That wonderful red-gold
hair--"setter color" her sister had always called it of her own. She
must write her sister. Mrs. Severance--an odd name. She rather wished,
though, that her face wouldn't turn faintly hard like that sometimes.

"No, Dickie. No chocolate unless your mother says you can have it. No,
Rosalind, if mother says not, you _certainly_ cannot go over and play at
the Rogers',--they have a paralytic grandmother who is very nervous."

Well, that was over. And now, for a few brief instants there would be
quiet and a chance to relax and really see something of Oliver. Mrs.
Crowe started moving slowly towards the door. Ted and Mrs. Severance
blocked the way, talking rather intimately, she thought, for people who
had only known each other a few hours; but then that was the modern way.
Then Ted saw her and seemed to wake up with a jump from whatever mild
dream possessed him, and Mrs. Severance turned toward her.

"It's so _comfortable_ being out here, always," she said very naturally
and kindly, but Mrs. Crowe did not reply at once to the pretty speech.
Instead she flushed deeply and bent over something small and white on
the chair with the dictionary in it that had been next to hers. Jane
Ellen had finally succeeded in taking off her drawers.

X

Ted and Oliver were down at the beach at Southampton two Sundays
later--week-end guests of Peter Piper--the three had been classmates
at Yale and the friendship had not lapsed like so many because Peter
happened to be rich and Ted and Oliver poor. And then there was always
Elinor, Peter's sister--Ted seemed, to Oliver's amused vision, at least,
to be looking at Elinor with the hungry eyes of a man seeing a delicate,
longed-for dream made flesh just at present instead of a girl he had
known since she first put up her hair. How nice that would be if it
happened, thought Oliver, match-makingly--how very nice indeed! Best
thing in the world for Ted--and Elinor too--if Ted would only get away
from his curiously Puritan idea that a few minor lapses from New England
morality in France constituted the unpardonable