had walked up and down the board path with her under
the vivid white light of a full moon, and she had whipped out one or
two such savage things about life that he had been startled. During
their ride that afternoon, too, her bubbling chatter of light stuff
about people and things had several times shifted into comments as to
the conventions that were so careless as to make him ask himself
whether they could really have come from lips so fresh and young. And
why had that queer look of almost childlike grief come into her eyes a
moment ago at the sight of ah everyday sunset? He was mightily
intrigued. She was a queer kid, he told himself, as changeable and
difficult to follow as some of the music by men with such weird names
as Rachmaninoff and Tschaikowsky that his sister was so precious fond
of playing. But she was unattached and frightfully pretty and always
ready for any fun that was going, and she liked him more than the
others, and he liked being liked, and although not hopelessly in love
was ready and willing and even anxious to be walked on if she would
acknowledge his existence in no other way. It was none of his business,
he told himself, to speculate as to what she was trying to hide away in
the back of her mind, from herself as well as from everybody else. This
was his last vacation as a Yale man, and he was all out to make the
most of it.

As soon as he was at her side she ran her hand through his arm and fell
into step. The shadow had passed, and her eyes were dancing again. "It
appears that the Hosacks turn up their exclusive noses at the club
dances," she said. "What are we going to do about it?"

"There's one to-night, isn't there? Do you want to go?"

"Of course I do. I haven't danced since away back before the great
wind. Let's sneak off after dinner for an hour without a word to a soul
and get our fill of it. There's to be a special Jazz band to-night, I
hear, and I simply can't keep away. Are you game, Harry?"

"All the way," said young Oldershaw, "and it will be the first time in
the history of the Hosacks that any members of their house parties have
put in an appearance at the club at night. No wonder Easthampton has
nicknamed the place St. James's Palace, eh?"

Joan shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, my dear boy," she said, "life's too
short for all that stuff, and there's no hobby so painful as cutting
off one's nose to spite one's face. And, after all, what's the matter
with Easthampton people? I