s though I had completely vanished. So far as the lovely Miss
Briggs was concerned I had ceased to exist. She turned toward a nice old
lady.

"What can I show you, Mrs. Scudder?" she asked cheerily; "and how is
that wonderful baby?"

I felt as though I had been lifted by the collar, thrown out upon a
hard sidewalk, and my hat tossed after me. Greatly shaken, and mentally
brushing the dust from my hands and knees, I hastened to the ferry and
crossed to Fairharbor. I was extremely angry. By an utter stranger I
had been misjudged, snubbed and cast into outer darkness. For myself I
readily found excuses. If a young woman was so attractive that at the
first sight of her men could not resist buying her fifty-dollar books
and hiring automobiles in which to take her driving, the fault was hers.
I assured myself that girls as lovely as Miss Briggs were a menace to
the public. They should not be at large. An ordinance should require
them to go masked. For Miss Briggs also I was able to make excuses. Why
should she not protect herself from the advances of strange young men?
If a popular novelist, and especially an ex-popular one, chose to go
about disguised as a drummer for the Blue Bird automobile and behaved
as such, and was treated as such, what right had he to complain? So
I persuaded myself I had been punished as I deserved. But to salve my
injured pride I assured myself also that any one who read my novels
ought to know my attitude toward any lovely lady could be only
respectful, protecting, and chivalrous. But with this consoling thought
the trouble was that nobody read my novels.

In finding Harbor Castle I had no difficulty. It stood upon a rocky
point that jutted into Buzzards Bay. Five acres of artificial lawn and
flower-beds of the cemetery and railroad-station school of horticulture
surrounded it, and from the highroad it was protected by a stone wall so
low that to the passerby, of the beauties of Harbor Castle nothing was
left to the imagination. Over this wall roses under conflicting banners
of pink and red fought fiercely. One could almost hear the shrieks
of the wounded. Upon the least thorny of these I seated myself and in
tender melancholy gazed upon the home of my childhood. That is, upon the
home that might-have-been.

When surveying a completed country home, to make the owner thoroughly
incensed the correct thing to say is, "This place has great
possibilities!"

Harbor Castle had more possibilities tha