ld, might have supplied, he told himself in
keen self-pity. With her love to arm him, her clear-eyed faith to inspire
him.... He sat up straight and pushed the cup of bitter herbs aside. There
would be time enough to drain it farther on.

"Coming back to the stock market and the present crisis," he said,
breaking the silence in sheer self-defense; "Ormsby and I----"

She put the resurrected topic back into its grave with a little gesture of
apathetic impatience she used now and then with Ormsby.

"I suppose I ought to be interested, but I am not," she confessed. "Mother
will do as she thinks best, and we shall calmly acquiesce, as we always
do."

David Kent was not sorry to be relieved in so many words of the persuasive
responsibility, and the talk drifted into reminiscence, with the Croydon
summer for a background.

It was a dangerous pastime for Kent; perilous, and subversive of many
things. One of his meliorating comforts had been the thought that however
bitter his own disappointment was, Elinor at least was happy. But in this
new-old field of talk a change came over her and he was no longer sure she
was entirely happy. She was saying things with a flavor akin to cynicism
in them, as thus:

"Do you remember how we used to go into raptures of pious indignation over
the make-believe sentiment of the summer man and the summer girl? I
recollect your saying once that it was wicked; a desecration of things
which ought to be held sacred. It isn't so very long ago, but I think we
were both very young that summer--years younger than we can ever be again.
Don't you?"

"Doubtless," said David Kent. He was at a pass in which he would have
agreed with her if she had asserted that black was white. It was not
weakness; it was merely that he was absorbed in a groping search for the
word which would fit her changed mood.

"We have learned to be more charitable since," she went on; "more
charitable and less sentimental, perhaps. And yet we prided ourselves on
our sincerity in that young time, don't you think?"

"I, at least, was sincere," he rejoined bluntly. He had found the
mood-word at last: it was resentment; though, being a man, he could see no
good reason why the memories of the Croydon summer should make her
resentful.

She was not looking at him when she said: "No; sincerity is always just.
And you were not quite just, I think."

"To you?" he demanded.

"Oh, no; to yourself."

Portia Van Brock's accusation wa