it him the pleasures of the card-table without personal loss.

But the Pages had retired to dress, and Voucher was for motoring, and he
had no use for his wife, and he was afraid of Plank's game, and Siward,
seated on the edge of the pool and sharing a pint of ginger-ale with
Sylvia Landis, shook his head at the suggestion and resumed his division
of the ginger-ale.

Plank and Leila Mortimer came down to congratulate them. Sylvia, always
instinctively and particularly nice to people of Plank's sort whom she
occasionally encountered, was so faultlessly amiable, that Plank, who
had never before permitted himself the privilege of monopolising
her, found himself doing it so easily that it kept him in a state of
persistent mental intoxication.

That slow, sweet, upward training inflection to a statement which
instantly became a confided question was an unconscious trick which
had been responsible, in Sylvia's brief life, for more mistakes than
anything else. Like others before him, Beverly Plank made the
mistake that the sweetness of voice and the friendliness of eyes were
particularly personal to him, in tribute to qualities he had foolishly
enough hitherto not suspected in himself. Now he suspected them,
and whatever of real qualities desirable had been latent in him also
appeared at once, confirming his modest suspicions. Certainly he was
a wit! Was not this perfectly charming girl's responsive and delicious
laughter proof enough? Certainly he was epigrammatic! Certainly he could
be easy, polished, amusing, sympathetic, and vastly interesting all the
while. Could he not divine it in her undivided attention, the quick,
amused flicker of recognition animating her beautiful face when he had
turned a particularly successful phrase or taken a verbal hurdle without
a cropper? And above all, her kindness to him impressed him; her natural
and friendly pleasure in being agreeable. Here he was already on an
informal footing with one of the persons of whom he had been most shy
and uncertain. If people were going to be as considerate of him as she
had proved, why--why--

His dull, Dutch-blue eyes returned to her, fascinated. The conquest of
what he desired and meant to have became merged in a vague plan which
included such a marriage as he had dreamed of.

Somebody had once told him that a man who could afford to dress for
dinner could go anywhere; meaning that, being a man, nature had fitted
his feet with the paraphernalia for