at hewn logs outside, and rafters within, and a winding
oak stairway, and any number of dens and cosy corners, and broad
window-seats with mountains of pillows. Everything here was built for
comfort--there was a billiard-room and a smoking-room, and a real
library with readable books and great chairs in which one sank out of
sight. There were log fires blazing everywhere, and pictures on the
walls that told of sport, and no end of guns and antlers and trophies
of all sorts. But you were not to suppose that all this elaborate
rusticity would be any excuse for the absence of attendants in livery,
and a chef who boasted the cordon bleu, and a dinner-table resplendent
with crystal and silver and orchids and ferns. After all, though the
host called it a "small" place, he had invited twenty guests, and he
had a hunter in his stables for each one of them.

But the most wonderful thing about "The Roost" was the fact that, at a
touch of a button, all the walls of the lower rooms vanished into the
second story, and there was one huge, log-lighted room, with violins
tuning up and calling to one's feet. They set a fast pace here--the
dancing lasted until three o'clock, and at dawn again they were dressed
and mounted, and following the pink-coated grooms and the hounds across
the frost-covered fields.

Montague was half prepared for a tame fox, but this was spared him.
There was a real game, it seemed; and soon the pack gave tongue, and
away went the hunt. It was the wildest ride that Montague ever had
taken--over ditches and streams and innumerable rail-fences, and
through thick coverts and densely populated barnyards; but he was in at
the death, and Alice was only a few yards behind, to the immense
delight of the company. This seemed to Montague the first real life he
had met, and he thought to himself that these full-blooded and
high-spirited men and women made a "set" into which he would have been
glad to fit--save only that he had to earn his living, and they did not.

In the afternoon there was more riding, and walks in the crisp November
air; and indoors, bridge and rackets and ping-pong, and a fast and
furious game of roulette, with the host as banker. "Do I look much like
a professional gambler?" he asked of Montague; and when the other
replied that he had not yet met any New York gamblers, young Harvey
went on to tell how he had gone to buy this apparatus (the sale of
which was forbidden by law) and had been asked by the