t until
she fell in love--not with him--but with Gorston Old Hall.

He limped perceptibly still, and could not walk far without pain, so he
decided to be extravagant for the first time since "coming into his
money" and hire a small, cheap motor-car. It was driven by its small,
cheap owner, a young man with a ferocious fund of information about
Santa Barbara, and every one who had ever lived there.

"Heard of the Fay place?" he echoed Denin's first question. "Well, I
should smile! Why, me and Barbie Fay are about the same age," he
plunged on, so violently that no interruption could have stopped him.
"Not that we were in the same _set_. Not much! But a cat can look at a
king. And any boy can look at any girl, I guess. Gee! That little girl
was some _worth_ lookin' at! Her mother thought she was too good for us
plain Americans, so she took her off to Europe and clapped her in a
convent, after the old man died. They've never been back this way
since, nor won't be now. The girl's been married twice, I was readin'
in the papers. Once to some English lord or other who left her the same
day, and got himself killed in France; and the second time, just a few
weeks ago, to a cousin on her mother's side--a Britisher, too. There
was an interview with the mother in the _San Francisco Call_, I saw.
One of our California journalists over there in the war-zone got
it--quite a good scoop. Mrs. Fay said it was an old romance between
Barbie and this Captain-What's-his-name. But we never seen him here. I
guess he's English, root and branch. Good thing for that 'old romance'
they could make sure the other chap was killed all right, all right,
wasn't it? Some of them poor fellows gets blown to bits so you can't
tell one from t' other, they say. But the girl's mother mentioned to
our _Call_ reporter, that they knew the husband's body by a stylograph
pen in a gold case, which was her own last present to him. If it hadn't
been for that little thing, found in a rag or two left of the feller's
coat, Barbie wouldn't have dast married again, I bet. Say, that's one
of them anecdotes they put under the heading of 'Too Strange not to be
True!' ain't it?"

"Yes, it is strange," Denin repeated mechanically. It was strange,
too--above all strange--that he should have had to come to Barbara's
birthplace to learn this detail casually. A thousand times he had
wondered how they had identified John Denin's body with enough
certainty to take it back to Engla