ad two bad months--never mind
why, and Christmas was coming, and--I just wanted to see your perfectly
sane and normal face again."

"I wish you'd let me know sooner where you were."

She evaded his eyes.

"I was getting settled, and studying, and learning to knit, and--oh, I'm
the most wretched knitter, Clay! I just stick at it doggedly. I say
to myself that hands that can play golf, and use a pen, and shoot, and
drive a car, have got to learn to knit. But look here!"

She held up a forlorn looking sock to his amused gaze. "And I think I'm
a clever woman."

"You're a very brave woman, Audrey," he said. "You'll let me come back,
won't you?"

"Heavens, yes. Whenever you like. And I'm going to stop being a recluse.
I just wanted to think over some things."

On the way home he stopped at his florist's, and ordered a mass of
American beauties for her on Christmas morning. She had sent her love to
Natalie, so that night he told Natalie he had seen her, and such details
of her life as he knew.

"I'm glad she's coming to her senses," Natalie said. "Everything's been
deadly dull without her. She always made things go--I don't know just
how," she added, as if she had been turning her over in her mind. "What
sort of business did she want to see you about?"

"She has a girl she wants to get into the mill."

"Good gracious, she must be changed," said Natalie. And proceeded--she
was ready to go out to dinner--to one of her long and critical surveys
of herself in the cheval mirror. Recently those surveys had been rather
getting on Clayton's nerves. She customarily talked, not to him, but to
his reflection over her shoulder, when, indeed, she took her eyes from
herself.

"I wonder," she said, fussing with a shoulder-strap, "who Audrey will
marry if anything happens to Chris?"

She saw his face and raised her eyebrows.

"You needn't scowl like that. He's quite as likely as not never to come
back, isn't he? And Audrey didn't care a pin for him."

"We're talking rather lightly of a very terrible thing, aren't we?"

"Oh, you're not," she retorted. "You think just the same things as I do,
but you're not so open about them. That's all."

CHAPTER XI

Graham was engaged. He hardly knew himself how it had come about. His
affair with Marion had been, up to the very moment of his blurted--out
"I want you," as light-hearted as that of any of the assorted young
couples who flirted and kissed behind the closed doors of th