, however, with amusement.
"I'm coming to see you," he announced.

"Do be careful," she had cried, "you'll burn yourself!"

"That," he answered, tossing away the match, "is to be expected."

She laughed nervously.

"Good night," he added, "and remember my bet."

What could he have meant when he had declared that she would not remain
in Quicksands?

CHAPTER VI

GAD AND MENI

There was an orthodox place of worship at Quicksands, a temple not merely
opened up for an hour or so on Sunday mornings to be shut tight during
the remainder of the week although it was thronged with devotees on the
Sabbath. This temple, of course, was the Quicksands Club. Howard Spence
was quite orthodox; and, like some of our Puritan forefathers, did not
even come home to the midday meal on the first day of the week. But a
certain instinct of protest and of nonconformity which may have been
remarked in our heroine sent her to St. Andrews-by-the-Sea--by no means
so well attended as the house of Gad and Meni. She walked home in a
pleasantly contemplative state of mind through a field of daisies, and
had just arrived at the hedge m front of the Brackens when the sound of
hoofs behind her caused her to turn. Mr. Trixton Brent, very firmly
astride of a restive, flea-bitten polo pony, surveyed her amusedly.

"Where have you been?" said he.

"To church," replied Honora, demurely.

"Such virtue is unheard of in Quicksands."

"It isn't virtue," said Honora.

"I had my doubts about that, too," he declared.

"What is it, then?" she asked laughingly, wondering why he had such a
faculty of stirring her excitement and interest.

"Dissatisfaction," was his prompt reply.

"I don't see why you say that," she protested.

"I'm prepared to make my wager definite," said he. "The odds are a
thoroughbred horse against a personally knitted worsted waistcoat that
you won't stay in Quicksands six months."

"I wish you wouldn't talk nonsense," said Honora, "and besides, I can't
knit."

There was a short silence during which he didn't relax his disconcerting
stare.

"Won't you come in?" she asked. "I'm sorry Howard isn't home."

"I'm not," he said promptly. "Can't you come over to my box for lunch?
I've asked Lula Chandos and Warry Trowbridge."

It was not without appropriateness that Trixton Brent called his house
the "Box." It was square, with no pretensions to architecture whatever,
with a porch running all the way around it. And it was