the summer were on, dinners, dances and picnics,
but her mourning made her absence inconspicuous. She could not, however,
avoid Mrs. Sayre. She tried to, at first, but that lady's insistence and
her own apathy made it easier to accept than to refuse. Then, after a
time, she found the house rather a refuge. She seldom saw Wallie, and
she found her hostess tactful, kindly and uninquisitive.

"Take the scissors and a basket, child, and cut your mother some roses,"
she would say. Or they would loot the green houses and, going in the car
to the cemetery, make of Jim's grave a thing of beauty and remembrance.

Now and then, of course, she saw Wallie, but he never reverted to the
day she had told him of her engagement. Mother and son, she began to
feel that only with them could she be herself. For the village, her chin
high as Nina had said. At home, assumed cheerfulness. Only at the house
on the hill could she drop her pose.

She waited with a sort of desperate courage for word from Harrison
Miller. What she wanted that word to be she did not know. There were,
of course, times when she had to face the possibility that Dick had
deliberately cut himself off from her. After all, there had never been
any real reason why he should care for her. She was not clever and not
beautiful. Perhaps he had been disappointed in her, and this was the
thing they were concealing. Perhaps he had gone back to Wyoming and had
there found some one more worthy of im, some one who understood when he
talked about the things he did in his laboratory, and did not just sit
and listen with loving, rather bewildered eyes.

Then, one night at dinner, a telegram was brought in, and she knew it
was the expected word. She felt her mother's eyes on her, and she sat
very still with her hands clenched in her lap. But her father did not
read it at the table; he got up and went out, and some time later he
came to the door. The telegram was not in sight.

"That was from Harrison Miller," he said. "He has traced Dick to a hotel
at Norada, but he had left the hotel, and he hasn't got in touch with
him yet."

He went away then, and they heard the house door close.

Then, some days later, she learned that Harrison Miller was coming home,
and that David was being brought back. She saw that telegram from Mr.
Miller, and read into it failure and discouragement, and something more
ominous than either.

"Reach home Tuesday night. Nothing definite. Think safe."

"Th