drick flattened himself in a corner
just inside the door.

"I should break any engagement whatsoever if I had one," Mr.
Corliss was saying with what the eavesdropper considered an
offensively "foreign" accent and an equally unjustifiable
gallantry; "but of course I haven't: I am so utterly a stranger
here. Your mother is immensely hospitable to wish you to ask me,
and I'll be only too glad to stay. Perhaps after dinner you'll be
very, very kind and play again? Of course you know how remarkable
such----"

"Oh, just improvising," Cora tossed off, carelessly, with a
deprecatory ripple of laughter. "It's purely with the mood, you
see. I can't make myself do things. No; I fancy I shall not play
again today."

There was a moment's silence.

"Shan't I fasten that in your buttonhole for you," said Cora.

"You see how patiently I've been awaiting the offer!"

There was another little silence; and the listener was able to
construct a picture (possibly in part from an active memory) of
Cora's delicate hands uplifted to the gentleman's lapel and Cora's
eyes for a moment likewise uplifted.

"Yes, one has moods," she said, dreamily. "I am _all_ moods. I
think you are too, Mr. Corliss. You _look_ moody. Aren't you?"

A horrible grin might have been seen to disfigure the shadow in
the corner just within the doorway.

CHAPTER THREE

It was cooler outdoors, after dinner, in the dusk of that evening;
nevertheless three members of the Madison family denied themselves
the breeze, and, as by a tacitly recognized and habitual
house-rule, so disposed themselves as to afford the most agreeable
isolation for the younger daughter and the guest, who occupied
wicker chairs upon the porch. The mother and father sat beneath a
hot, gas droplight in the small "library"; Mrs. Madison with an
evening newspaper, her husband with "King Solomon's Mines"; and
Laura, after crisply declining an urgent request from Hedrick to
play, had disappeared upstairs. The inimical lad alone was
inspired for the ungrateful role of duenna.

He sat upon the topmost of the porch steps with the air of being
permanently implanted; leaning forward, elbows on knees, cheeks on
palms, in a treacherous affectation of profound reverie; and his
back (all of him that was plainly visible in the hall light)
tauntingly close to a delicate foot which would, God wot!
willingly have launched him into the darkness beyond. It was his
dreadful pleasure to understand wholly