eorgiana looked round at him. "I prefer to finish one ride before I
begin another," she declared, smiling. "It's only a mile, Mr. Channing;
we shall be there nearly as soon as you. Please go on."

It thus came about ten minutes later that James Stuart, walking up to
his home from a field where he had been superintending an interesting
new departure in cultivation, caught sight first of a now-familiar
roadster of aristocratic lines whose appearance thereabouts had become
most unwelcome, and shortly thereafter of a less pretentious vehicle,
being rapidly drawn by a still more familiar black horse, and occupied
by two people whom it gave Stuart no acute pleasure to see together.

"Well, I should say George was displaying her admirers in great shape
this afternoon," he said gloomily to himself. "It's a wonder I'm not
trailing on behind with a wheelbarrow. But I vow I'd like to know since
when her contract with Jefferson has taken them out into the
country--and in working hours, too!"

Afterward it was all rather a strange memory to Georgiana when she
recalled it. She had flown about to prepare the appetizing early supper
with which she was accustomed to serve her small family, and to which
she now added a delicacy or two on account of its seeming the natural
thing to ask Mr. Miles Channing to remain rather than to allow him to go
to the small village hotel. Then she had cleared her table and left the
after-work to the neighbour who was to come to the rescue as before. She
had dressed with hurried fingers for the trip, and had driven away with
a devoted escort who spared no pains to make her feel that he was
exceedingly pleased at the success of his mission.

There was no place in her memory for something she did not see nor would
have thought of imagining significant if she had seen it. When she left
the house Mr. Jefferson was in his room, searching for a book from which
to read aloud to his self-assumed charge of the evening. When he heard
Georgiana's blithe cry of farewell to her father in the doorway below,
he left the bookcase and went with a quick step to the window. He
watched the car driven by Mr. Channing out of sight down the road; then
he descended to the garden, pipe in hand. Before he returned to the
house to take his place by the evening lamp and begin the reading to the
gentle invalid stretched on the couch, he had covered many furlongs up
and down the straggling pathways and had consumed much more than his