at popular
house.

The crowd which frequented the Hayden home was gay, tolerant and
occasionally nasty. It made ardent love semi-promiscuously, it drank
rather more than it should, and its desire for a good time often brought
it rather close to the danger line. It did not actually step over, but
it hovered gayly on the brink.

And Toots remained high-priestess of her little cult. The men liked
her. The girls imitated her. And Graham, young as he was, seeing her
popularity, was vastly gratified to find himself standing high in her
favor.

Marion was playing for the stake of the Spencer money. In her intimate
circle every one knew it but Graham.

"How's every little millionaire?" was Tommy Hale's usual greeting.

She knew only one way to handle men, and with the stake of the Spencer
money she tried every lure of her experience on Graham. It was always
Marion who on cold nights sat huddled against him in the back seat of
the Hayden's rather shabby car, her warm ungloved hand in his. It was
Marion who taught him to mix the newest of cocktails, and who later
praised his skill. It was Marion who insisted on his having a third,
too, when the second had already set his ears drumming.

The effect on the boy of her steady propinquity, of her constant
caressing touches, of the general letting-down of the bars of restraint,
was to rouse in him impulses of which he was only vaguely conscious,
and his proposal of marriage, when it finally came, was by nature of a
confession. He had kissed her, not for the first time, but this time she
had let him hold her, and he had rained kisses on her face.

"I want you," he had said, huskily.

And even afterward, when the thing was done, and she had said she would
marry him, she had to ask him if he loved her.

"I--of course I do," he had said. And had drawn her back into his arms.

He wanted to marry her at once. It was the strongest urge of his life,
and put into his pleading an almost pathetic earnestness. But she was
firm enough now.

"I don't think your family will be crazy about this, you know."

"What do we care for the family? They're not marrying you, are they?"

"They will have to help to support me, won't they?"

And he had felt a trifle chilled.

It was not a part of Marion's program to enter the Spencer family
unwelcomed. She had a furtive fear of Clayton Spencer, the fear of the
indirect for the direct, of the designing woman for the essentially
simple and open ma