. .

Trego was a horse of another colour altogether. The very name of Trego
was hateful in her hearing. There was little she would not willingly
have done, however unjust and unfair, to avoid further communications
with this animal of a Trego.

And yet, as she had learned, the term of his stay at Gosnold House had
still another week to run, and he was in some way a favourite and
intimate of Mrs. Gosnold, apt frequently to figure as her guest; and
since this was so, and Sally herself bade fair (barring accidents) to
prove a fixture in the household, it seemed inevitable that they must
be often thrown together. So she must at all costs school herself to
treat him civilly--at least without overt animosity.

She could imagine no task more difficult or distasteful; short of
forfeiting her place in this new sphere, she would have paid almost
any price for remission of that duty.

The irony of life seemed a bitter draft. Granting it had been
requisite to some strange design of fate, in its inscrutable vagary,
that several persons should suffer a night of broken rest at Gosnold
House, why must they have been those four and none other--Sally, Adele
Standish, Lyttleton, Trego? Especially Trego! Why that one? Palpable
bonds of mutual interest linked the three first named; their common
affliction might conceivably have been ascribable to subtle
psychological affinity. But Trego was well outside the triangle, even
as perceptibly out of sympathy with a majority of Mrs. Gosnold's
guests.

Mrs. Standish was studious in her avoidance of him without appearance
of open slight. His nature and Lyttleton's were essentially
antagonistic. Sally's animus had been well defined from the very
beginning, when she had resented his being both physically and
temperamentally so completely out of the picture of that existence to
which she aspired.

But reconnaissance up that dark alley demonstrated it an indisputable
impasse and Sally gave it up, reserving the grievance for tender
nursing (she had a very human weakness for selected wrongs) and
turned her attention to the puzzle involving Lyttleton's business on
the beach at 2 A. M. and the signals exchanged between yacht and
window.

Nor did she make much headway in this quarter. Instinct indicated a
delicate harmony between those events and the formless shadow to which
Sally had all along been sensitive, of something equivocal in the
pretensions of Mrs. Standish. But that clue played will-o'-