out a boat," she said, and added
hastily: "Mrs. Shorter was speaking of you this morning, and said that
you were always on the water when you were here. Newport must have been
quite different then."

He accepted the topic, and during the remainder of his visit she
succeeded in keeping the conversation in the middle ground, although she
had a sense of the ultimate futility of the effort; a sense of pressure
being exerted, no matter what she said. She presently discovered,
however, that the taste for literature attributed to him which had seemed
so incongruous--existed. He spoke with a new fire when she led him that
way, albeit she suspected that some of the fuel was derived from the
revelation that she shared his liking for books. As the extent of his
reading became gradually disclosed, however, her feeling of inadequacy
grew, and she resolved in the future to make better use of her odd
moments. On her table, in two green volumes, was the life of a
Massachusetts statesman that Mrs. Shorter had lent her. She picked it up
after Chiltern had gone. He had praised it.

He left behind him a blurred portrait on her mind, as that of two men
superimposed. And only that morning he had had such a distinct impression
of one. It was from a consideration of this strange phenomenon, with her
book lying open in her lap, that her maid aroused her to go to Mrs.
Pryor's. This was Tuesday.

Some of the modern inventions we deem most marvellous have been fitted
for ages to man and woman. Woman, particularly, possesses for instance a
kind of submarine bell; and, if she listens, she can at times hear it
tinkling faintly. And the following morning, Wednesday, Honora heard hers
when she received an invitation to lunch at Mrs. Shorter's. After a
struggle, she refused, but Mrs. Shorter called her up over the telephone,
and she yielded.

"I've got Alfred Dewing for myself," said Elsie Shorter, as she greeted
Honora in the hall. "He writes those very clever things--you've read
them. And Hugh for you," she added significantly.

The Shorter cottage, though commodious, was simplicity itself. From the
vine-covered pergola where they lunched they beheld the distant sea like
a lavender haze across the flats. And Honora wondered whether there were
not an element of truth in what Mr. Dewing said of their hostess--that
she thought nothing immoral except novels with happy endings. Chiltern
did not talk much: he looked at Honora.

"Hugh has got so serio