this morning said as much, when we fussed about my spelling. He
said I'd better write a new dictionary."

Clayton threw back his head and laughed, and after a moment she laughed,
too. But as he went on his face was grave. Somebody ought to be looking
after her. It was not for some time that he realized he carried the
absurd little spelling-book. He took it back to the office with him, and
put it in the back of a drawer of his desk. Joey, coming in some time
later, found him, with the drawer open, and something in his hands which
he hastily put away. Later on, Joey investigated that drawer, and found
the little book. He inspected it with a mixture of surprise and scorn.

"Spelling!" he muttered. "And a hundred dollar a month girl to spell for
him!"

It was Rodney Page who forced Audrey out of her seclusion.

Rodney had had a prosperous year, and for some time his conscience had
been bothering him. For a good many years he had blithely accepted
the invitations of his friends--dinners, balls, week-end and yachting
parties, paying his way with an occasional box of flowers. He decided,
that last winter of peace, to turn host and, true to instinct, to do the
unusual.

It was Natalie who gave him the suggestion.

"Why don't you turn your carriage-house into a studio, and give a studio
warming, Roddie? It would be fun fixing it up. And you might make it
fancy dress."

Before long, of course, he had accepted the idea as of his own
originating, and was hard at work.

Rodney's house had been his father's. He still lived there, although the
business district had encroached closely. And for some time he had used
the large stable and carriage-house at the rear as a place in which to
store the odd bits of furniture, old mirrors and odds and ends that he
had picked up here and there. Now and then, as to Natalie, he sold some
of them, but he was a collector, not a merchant. In his way, he was an
artist.

In the upper floor he had built a skylight, and there, in odd hours, he
worked out, in water-color, sketches of interiors, sometimes for houses
he was building, sometimes purely for the pleasure of the thing.

The war had brought him enormous increase in his collection. Owners of
French chateaus, driven to poverty, were sending to America treasures of
all sorts of furniture, tapestries, carpets, old fountains, porcelains,
even carved woodwork and ancient mantels, and Rodney, from the mixed
motives of business and pride, dec