aring down the vista of elms and
cottonwoods. She waved her hand gayly, and Ferriss responded with the
stump of one forearm.

On the next day but one, a Friday, Lloyd was to go to the country. Every
year in the heat of the summer Lloyd spent her short vacation in the
sleepy and old-fashioned little village of Bannister. The country around
the village was part of the Searight estate. It was quiet, off the
railroad, just the place to forget duties, responsibilities, and the
wearing anxieties of sick-rooms. But Thursday afternoon she expected
Bennett.

Thursday morning she was in her room. Her trunk was already packed.
There was nothing more to be done. She was off duty. There was neither
care nor responsibility upon her mind. But she was too joyful, too
happily exalted, too exuberant in gayety to pass her time in reading.
She wanted action, movement, life, and instinctively threw open a window
of her room, and, according to her habit, leaned upon her elbows and
looked out and down upon the square. The morning was charming. Later in
the day it probably would be very hot, but as yet the breeze of the
earliest hours was stirring nimbly. The cool of it put a brisker note in
the sombre glow of her cheeks, and just stirred a lock that, escaping
from her gorgeous coils of dark-red hair, hung curling over her ear and
neck. Into her eyes of dull blue--like the blue of old china--the
morning's sun sent an occasional unwonted sparkle. Over the asphalt and
over the green grass-plots of the square the shadows of the venerable
elms wove a shifting maze of tracery. Traffic avoided the place. It was
invariably quiet in the square, and one--as now--could always hear the
subdued ripple and murmur of the fountain in the centre.

But the crowning delight of that morning was the sudden appearance of a
robin in a tree close to Lloyd's window. He was searching his breakfast.
At every moment he came and went between the tree-tops and the
grass-plots, very important, very preoccupied, chittering and calling
the while, as though he would never tire. Lloyd whistled to him, and
instantly he answered, cocking his head sideways. She whistled again,
and he piped back an impudent response, and for quite five minutes the
two held an elaborate altercation between tree-top and window-ledge.
Lloyd caught herself laughing outright and aloud for no assignable
reason. "Ah, the world was a pretty good place after all!"

A little later, and while she was sti