e,
too?"

Ailsa merely looked at him.

Mrs. Craig said, laughing: "I knew you were all Ormond and entirely
Irish as soon as I came in the do'--befo' I became aware of your
racial fluency. I speak fo' my husband and myse'f when I say,
please remember that our do' is ve'y wide open to our own kin--and
that you are of them----"

"Oh, I'm all sorts of things beside--" He paused for a
second--"Cousin Celia," he added so lightly that the grace with
which he said it covered the impudence, and she laughed in
semi-critical approval and turned to Ailsa, whose smile in response
was chilly--chillier still when Berkley did what few men have done
convincingly since powdered hair and knee-breeches became
unfashionable--bent to salute Celia Craig's fingertips. Then he
turned to her and took his leave of her in a conventional manner
entirely worthy of the name his mother bore,--and her mother before
her, and many a handsome man and many a beautiful woman back to
times when a great duke stood unjustly attainted, and the Ormonds
served their king with steel sword and golden ewer; and served him
faithfully and well.

Camilla Lent called a little later. Ailsa was in the backyard
garden, a trowel in her hand, industriously loosening the earth
around the prairie roses.

"Camilla," she said, looking up from where she was kneeling among
the shrubs, "what was it you said this morning about Mr. Berkley
being some unpleasant kind of man?"

"How funny," laughed Camilla. "You asked me that twice before."

"Did I? I forgot," said Mrs. Paige with a shrug; and, bending over
again, became exceedingly busy with her trowel until the fire in
her cheeks had cooled.

"Every woman that ever saw him becomes infatuated with Phil
Berkley," said Camilla cheerfully. "I was. You will be. And the
worst of it is he's simply not worth it."

"I--thought not."

"Why did you think not?"

"I don't know why."

"He _can_ be fascinating," said Camilla reflectively, "but he
doesn't always trouble himself to be."

"Doesn't he?" said Ailsa with a strange sense of relief.

Camilla hesitated, lowered her voice.

"They say he is fast," she whispered. Ailsa, on her knees, turned
and looked up.

"Whatever that means," added Camilla, shuddering. "But all the
same, every girl who sees him begins to adore him immediately until
her parents make her stop."

"How silly," said Ailsa in a leisurely level voice. But her heart
was beating furiously, an