wn cigarettes.

"Don't you smoke any more?" asked Grace Ferrall of Leila Mortimer, and
at the smiling negative, "Oh, that perhaps explains it. You're growing
positively radiant, you know. You'll he wearing a braid and a tuck in
your skirt if you go on getting younger."

Leila laughed, colouring up as Plank turned in his chair to look at her
closer.

"No, it won't rub off, Mr. Plank," said Marion coolly, "but mine will.
This," touching a faint spot of colour under her eyes, "is art."

"Pooh! I'm all art!" said Grace. "Observe, Mr. Plank, that under this
becoming flush are the same old freckles you saw at Shotover." And she
laughed that sweet, careless laugh of an adolescent and straightened
her boyish figure, pretty head held high, adding: "Kemp won't let me
'improve' myself, or I'd do it."

"You are perfect," said Sylvia, rising from the table, her own
lovely, rounded, youthful figure condoning the exaggeration; "you're
sufficiently sweet as you are. Good people, if you are ready, we will
go through the ceremony of cutting for partners--unless otherwise you
decide. How say you?"

"I don't care to enter the scramble for a man," cried Grace. "If it's to
choose, I'd as soon choose Marion."

Plank looked at Leila, who laughed.

"All right; choose, then!" said Sylvia. "Howard, you're dying, of
course, to play with me, but you're looking very guiltily at Agatha."

The major asked Leila at once; so Plank fell to Sylvia, pitted against
Marion and Grace Ferrall.

A few moments later the quiet of the library was broken by the butler
entering with decanters and ice, and glasses that tinkled frostily.

Play began at table Number One on a passed make of no trumps by Sylvia,
and at the other table on a doubled and redoubled heart make, which
sent a delicate flush into Agatha's face, and drove the last vestige of
lingering thoughtfulness from Quarrier's, leaving it a tense, pallid,
and expressionless mask, out of which looked the velvet-fringed eyes of
a woman.

Of all the faces there at the two tables, Sylvia's alone had not
changed, neither assuming the gambler's mask nor the infatuated glare
of the amateur. She was thoughtful, excited, delighted, or dismayed by
turns, but always wholesomely so; the game for its own sake, and not the
stakes, absorbing her, partly because she had never permitted herself to
weigh money and pleasure in the same balance, but kept a mental pair of
scales for each.

As usual, the fever of