d.

As the two women rested, the sound of shouting voices was borne to
their ears. The old woman started, listening.

"Back from the river!" she cried, "soon will come men who, with long,
sharp poles, will push out the logs from the eddies, and from the still
waters of the bends, and, should the men of Moncrossen find this man
they will kill him--for all men die! Did not Lacombie die?"

CHAPTER XXVI

MAN OR TOY MAN?

The newspaper prediction of the forthcoming announcement of the
engagement of Miss Ethel Manton and Gregory St. Ledger was published,
not without color of authority, nor was it entirely out of keeping with
appearances.

As the gay calendar of society's romp and rout drew toward its close,
the names of these two became more and more intimately associated. It
was an association assiduously cultivated by young St. Ledger, and
earnestly fostered and abetted by the St. Ledger sisters who,
fluttering uncertainly upon the outermost rim of the circle immediately
surrounding society's innermost shrine, realized that the linking of
the Manton name with the newer name of St. Ledger, would prove an open
sesame to the half-closed doors of the Knickerbockers.

Despite two years' residence in the most expensive suite of a most
expensive hotel, nobody seemed to know much about the St. Ledgers. It
was an accepted fact that they were islanders from somewhere, variously
stated to be Jamaica, The Isle of Pines, and Barbadoes, whose wealth
was founded upon sugar, and appeared limitless.

St. Ledger _pere_, tall and saturnine, divided his time about equally
between New York and "the islands."

The two girls, ravishingly beautiful in their dark, semi-mysterious
way, had been brought from some out-of-the-way French convent to the
life of the great city, where to gain entree into society's holy of
holies became a fetish above their gods.

There was no _mere_ St. Ledger, and vague whisperings passed back and
forth between certain bleached out, flat-chested virgins, whose
forgotten youth and beauty were things long past, but whose tenure upon
society was as firm and unassailable as Plymouth Rock and the silver
leg of Peter Stuyvesant could make it.

It was hinted that the high-piled tresses of the sisters matched too
closely the hue of the raven's wing, and that the much admired "waves"
if left to themselves would resolve into decided "kinks."

They were guarded whisperings, however, non-committal, and so worde