it come"--securely.

They sat in silence for a while; then O-liver said: "I have brought you
a book."

It was an old copy of Punch.

"I shall like it," she said. "Sometimes the evenings are dull when my
work is over."

"Dullness comes for me when work begins."

Her straight gaze met his. "You say that with your lips; you don't mean
it."

"How do you know?"

"I'm not sure how I know. But you haven't found the thing yet that you
like--the incentive."

"Tommy wants me to go into politics. He and Henry Bittinger. Henry says
I ought to be President." O-liver chuckled.

But she took it seriously. "Why not? You've the brains and the
magnetism. Can't you see how the crowd draws to you on Saturday nights?"

"Like bees round a honey pot? Yes." His face grew suddenly stern. "But
so will mosquitoes buzz round a stagnant pool."

"You're not a stagnant pool and you know it."

"What am I?"

She made a sudden gesture as if she gave him up. "Sometimes I think you
are like the sea--on a lazy day--with a storm brewing."

He wondered as he went home--what storm?

He had seen a good deal of Jane since that Saturday night when he had
championed her cause. It had been fall then, with the hills brown and
the berries red on the pepper trees. It was spring now, with all the
world green and growing.

She had spoken of him to Tommy, and Tommy had been a faithful
go-between. He had played upon their mutual love of books. At first
O-liver had sent her books, then he had taken them. He had met her
mother, had seen her in her home doing feminine things, sewing on
lengths of pink and blue--filling the vases with the flowers that he
brought.

And as they had met and talked his veins had been filled with new wine.
He had never known intimately such a woman. His mother transplanted from
the East by her marriage to a Western man had turned her eyes always
backward. Her son had been born in the East, he had spent his holidays
and vacations with his Eastern relatives. He had gone to an Eastern
school to prepare for an Eastern college. Except for this one obsession
with regard to her son's education his mother was self-centered. She was
an idolized wife, a discontented woman--- she had shown O-liver no
heights to which to aspire.

And so he had not aspired. He had spent his days in what might be
termed, biblically, riotous living. His mother had hoped for an
aristocratic and Eastern marriage. When he married Fluffy Hair she had
allo