ing had left it hot and stuffy. A hideous
squatting Chinese goddess, whose tongue, by a mechanical appliance,
lolled from side to side, appeared to be panting for breath, and the
cut flowers in numerous pompous vases hung their limp heads. It was a
gorgeously hot day.

Young Oldershaw bounded in, the picture of unrealized health. His tan
was almost black, and his teeth and the whites of, his eyes positively
gleamed. He might have been a Cuban.

"Didn't I hear you tell Prim last night that you'd had a letter from
your cousin?"

"Old Howard? Yes." He was sorry that she had.

"Is Martin with him?" It was an inspiration, an uncanny piece of
feminine intuition.

Young Oldershaw was honest. "He's staying with Gray," he said
reluctantly.

"Where?"

"At Devon."

"Devon? Isn't that the place we drove to the other day--with a little
club and a sort of pier and sailboats gliding about?"

"Yes. They've got one."

Ah, that was why she had had a queer feeling of Martinism while she had
sat there having tea, watching the white sails against the sky. On one
of those boats bending gracefully to the wind Martin must have been.

"Where are they living?"

"In a cottage that belongs to a pal of Gray's, so far as I could
gather."

In a cottage, together! Then the girl whom she had called "Fairy,"--the
girl who was human and real, according to Gilbert, couldn't be, surely
couldn't be, with them.

"Will you drive me over?" she asked.

"When?"

"Now."

"Why, of course, Joan, if I--must," he said. It somehow seemed to him
to be wrong and incredible that she had a husband,--this girl, so free
and young and at the very beginning of things, like himself, and whom
he had grown into the habit of regarding as his special--hardly
property, but certainly companion and playmate.

"If you're not keen about it, Harry, I'll ask Mr. Hosack or a
chauffeur. Pray don't let me take you an inch out of your way."

In an instant he was off his stilts and on his marrow bones. "Please
don't look like that and say those things. You've only got to tell me
what you want and I'll get it. You know that."

"Thank you, Harry, the sooner the better, then," she said, with a smile
that lit up her face like a sunbeam. She must see Martin, she must, she
must! The old longing had come back. It was like a pain. And being with
Howard Oldershaw in that cottage he was alone, and being alone he had
got back into his armor. SHE had a clean slate.

"Hurry,