y accepted Huntington's invitation to
stroll to the pier, leaving Miss Stevens and Cosden by themselves.

"I've made an appointment for you on Monday morning," Thatcher remarked
to Cosden as he passed by.

"Good! I'll keep it," was the prompt response.

"What do you think of Marian's resurrection?" Edith asked him when they
were alone.

Cosden looked in the direction of the pier. "Do you mean--" he began.

"Oh, no!" she interrupted him. "That is merely a revival, which I
imagine may develop into an experience meeting. I mean Mr. Hamlen. Think
of a devotion that forces a man to bury himself for twenty years! I
could throw myself on his neck for restoring my lost belief in the
constancy of man."

"I hadn't heard that side of the story," Cosden observed.

"It was while we were at school together," Edith explained. "Marian was
irresistible then--as now, and every man she met lost his head
altogether; but for a time she and Mr. Hamlen were engaged. Then she
married the last man we expected; but she and Harry have been very
happy. It simply shows that you never can tell."

"Did you know Hamlen then?"

"No; but I heard enough about him. If he had been merely intelligent
instead of intellectual he might have had her just as well as not. He
simply frightened her out of it."

"Where did Monty come in?"

"I never heard of him; things couldn't have gone very far."

"You remember what he said just before we started out this morning? I
know him pretty well and Monty doesn't speak like that unless there is
something back of it."

"Well," Edith laughed, "I'm sure I should have known, even so. Why, I
could reel off so many names that you would think Marian was a heartless
coquette; but it wasn't that at all. She simply loved attention, as all
women do."

"How about the daughter?" queried Cosden.

"Merry?" Miss Stevens interrogated. "Oh, Merry is an up-to-date,
twentieth-century thoroughbred. Marian has never known just what to make
of her because she isn't like other girls, but to my mind the comparison
is all to her credit. I'm generous when I give the child so good a
character, for I know she heartily disapproves of me."

Cosden was pleased with the intuition he had shown in his selection. "I
should think young Huntington would bore her about as much as a
youngster in kilts," he said, to draw her out.

"He is her brother's friend, she adores athletics and dancing, and she
is exercising the prerogative of her age