Galway should have a cowpuncher hat as a present. The style of band
was a subject of discussion calling on their discriminative views of
Jim's personal tastes. This led to thoughts of others in Little Rivers
who would appreciate gifts, and to the purchase of toys for the children,
a positive revel. When they were through it was well past noon and they
were in the region of the restaurants. The sun in majestic altitude swept
the breadth of the Avenue.

"Shall we lunch--yes, and in the Best Swell Place?" he asked, as if it
were a matter-of-course part of the programme, while inwardly he was
stirred with the fear of her refusal. He felt that any minute she might
leave him, with no alternative but another farewell. She hesitated a
moment seriously, then accepted blithely and naturally.

"Yes, the Best Swell Place--let's! Who isn't entitled to the Best Swell
Place occasionally?"

After an argument in comparison of famous names, they were convinced that
they had really chosen the Best Swell Place by the fact of a vacant table
at a window looking out over a box hedge. Jack told the waiter that the
assemblage was not an autocracy, but a parliament which, with a full
quorum present, would enjoy in discursive appreciation selections from
the broad range of a bill of fare.

A luncheon for two narrows a walk on the Avenue, where you are part of a
crowd, into restricted intimacy. He was feeling the intoxication of her
inscrutability, catching gleams of the wealth that lay beyond it, across
the limited breadth of a table-cloth. He forgot about the unspoken
conditions in a sally which was like putting his hand on top of the
barrier for an impetuous leap across.

"I wrote you stacks of letters," he said, "and you never sent me one
little line; not even 'Yours received and contents noted!'"

In a flash all intimacy vanished. She might have been at the other end of
the dining-room in somebody else's party nodding to him as to an
acquaintance. Her answer was delayed about as long as it takes to lift an
arrow from a quiver and notch it in a bowstring.

"A novel may be very interesting, but that does not mean that I write to
the author!"

He imagined her going through the meal in polite silence or in measured
commonplaces, turning the happy parliament into a frigid Gothic ceremony.
Why had he not kept in mind that sufficient to the hour is the pleasure
of it? Famished for her companionship, a foolhardy impulse of temptation
had ris