rock--not a trace of excitement in her look.

O'Bannon thought, after midnight when he was totaling the score, "I
could make a terrible fool of myself about this girl."

When they were leaving he found himself standing on the steps beside
her. The footman had run down the drive to see why her chauffeur, after
a wait of more than an hour, wasn't bringing her car round. O'Bannon,
who was driving himself in an open car, came out, turning up the collar
of his overcoat, and found himself alone with her in the pale light of
the waning moon, which gave, as the waning moon always does, the effect
of being a strange, unfamiliar celestial visitor.

O'Bannon, like so many strict supporters of law, was subject to
invasions of lawless impulses. He thought now how easy it would be to
run off with a girl like this one and teach her that civilization was
not such a complete protection as she thought it. What an outcry she
would make, and yet perhaps she wouldn't really object! He had a theory
that men and women were more susceptible to emotion in the first minutes
of their meeting than at any subsequent time--at least in such first
meetings as this.

She was standing wrapping her black-and-silver cloak about her with that
straight-armed Indian pose.

"It's a queer light, isn't it?" she said.

He agreed. Something certainly was queer--the greenish silver light on
the withered leaves or the mist like a frothy flood on the lawn. Just as
she spoke two brighter lights shone through the mist--her car coming up
the drive with the footman standing on the step.

"Is that yours?" he asked.

She nodded, knowing that he was watching her.

"Why don't you send it away," he went on very quietly, "and let me drive
you home? This is no night for a closed car."

He hardly knew whether he had a plan or not, but his pulses beat more
quickly as she walked down the steps without answering him. He did not
know whether she was going to get into her car and drive away or give
orders to the man to go home without her. Then he saw that the footman
was closing the door on an empty car and the chauffeur releasing his
brake. When she came up the steps he was looking at the moon.

"I never get used to its waning," he said, as if he had been thinking of
nothing else.

She liked that--his not commenting in any way on her accepting an
invitation not entirely conventional from a stranger. Perhaps he did not
know that it wasn't. Oh, if he could only keep on