eak it not in
Ascalon," he promised. "That suit of clothes might prove your political
shroud."

Boone saw Anne that evening and with a thrilling voice told her of
McCalloway's return--but of the visit to the tailor he said nothing, and
she refrained from reverting to the topic of the party.

Anne was sensitive on the point of an invitation urgently given and not
eagerly accepted. That is what her consciousness registered, and she
told herself that it was petulant and unworthy to attach so much
importance to a minor disappointment. But without full realization,
other and graver thought elements hung with ponderous weight from the
peg of that lesser circumstance. Boone's inability to buy a dress suit
was a measure of his poverty and of the great undertaking which lay
ahead of him; of the length and steepness of the road he must travel
before he could come to her and say, "I have made a home for you."

She herself was to be presented to society with expensive display, and
her pride shivered fastidiously at the realization that all this outlay
came from a purse not their own, and entailed an undeclared obligation.
She had never been told just how far she and her mother depended on the
Colonel's bounty. That had been carefully left enveloped in a hazy
indefiniteness that revealed no sharp or embarrassing angle of detail.
Had she known it all, her shiver of distaste would have been a shudder
of chagrin. But Anne was enough in love with Boone to feel that by his
absence from her social launching the sparkle of her little personal
triumph would be dulled.

But when at last she stood in her receiving line, radiant in her young
loveliness, she glanced up and her violet eyes took on a sudden sparkle,
while her cheeks flushed with surprised pleasure, for there, making his
way through the door, came Boone.

He came with his stage fright as invisible as the secrets of Bluebeard's
closet, so that even Mrs. Masters, looking up with equal surprise though
not an equal delight, admitted that in appearance, at least, he was no
liability to her company of guests.

The clothes that Victor McCalloway had supervised were tailored as they
should have been, with every requisite of conservative elegance, and
they set off a figure of a man well sculptured of line and proportion.

As he took Anne's hand he said in a lowered voice and with a twinkle in
his eyes, "I came in through the front door--but there wasn't any arch.
My legs are shakin