of the house-party at Shotover were numbered. A fresh relay of
guests was to replace them on Monday, and so they were making the most
of the waning week on lawn and marsh, in covert and blind, or motoring
madly over the State, or riding in parties to Vermillion Light. Tennis
and lawn bowls came into fashion; even water polo and squash alternated
on days too raw for more rugged sport.

And during all these days Beverly Plank appeared with unflagging
persistence and assiduity, until his familiar, big, round head and
patient, delft-blue, Dutch eyes became a matter of course at Shotover,
indoors and out.

It was not that he was either accepted, tolerated, or endured; he was
simply there, and nobody took the trouble to question his all-pervading
presence until everybody had become too much habituated to him to think
about it at all.

The accomplished establishment of Beverly Plank was probably due as much
to his own obstinate and good-tempered persistence as to Mrs. Mortimer.
He was a Harvard graduate--there are all kinds of them--enormously
wealthy, and though he had no particular personal tastes to gratify, he
was willing and able to gratify the tastes of others. He did whatever
anybody else did, and did it well enough to be amusing; and as lack of
intellectual development never barred anybody from any section of the
fashionable world, it seemed fair to infer that he would land where he
wanted to, sooner or later.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Mortimer led him about with the confidence that was
her perquisite; and the chances were that in due time he would have
house-parties of his own at Black Fells--not the kind he had wisely
denied himself the pleasure of giving, with such neighbours as the
Ferralls to observe, but the sort he desired. However, there were many
things to be accomplished for him and by him before he could expect to
use his great yacht and his estates and his shooting boxes and the vast
granite mansion recently completed and facing Central Park just north
of the new palaces built on the edges of the outer desert where Fifth
Avenue fringes the hundreds.

Meanwhile, he had become in a measure domesticated at Shotover, and
Shotover people gradually came to ride, drive, and motor over the
Fells, which was a good beginning, though not necessarily a promise for
anything definite in the future.

Mortimer, riding a huge chestnut--he could still wedge himself into
a saddle--had now made it a regular practice to affect t