se window, but it was quickly withdrawn. She never
liked men to be in close conclave without a woman to superintend, yet
she could not have told why. She had a hazy impression, as she might
have had if they had been children, that some mischief was afoot.

"Sitting out there all this time, and smoking, and never seeming to
speak a word," she said to herself, as she returned to her seat
beside a front window in the south room and took up her book. She was
reading with a mild and patronizing interest a book in which the
heroine did nothing which she would possibly have done under given
circumstances, and said nothing which she would have said, and was,
moreover, a distinctly different personality from one chapter to
another, yet the whole had a charm for the average woman reader.
Henry had flung it aside in contempt. Sylvia thought it beautiful,
possibly for the reason that her own hard sense was sometimes a
strenuous burden, and in reading this she was forced to put it behind
her. However, the book did not prevent her from returning every now
and then to her own life and the happenings in it. Hence her stealthy
journeys across the house and peeps at the men in the grove. If they
were nettled by a sense of feminine mystery, she reciprocated. "What
on earth did they want to stop Rose from going to see Lucy for?"
seemed to stare at her in blacker type than the characters of the
book.

Presently, when she saw Horace pass the window and disappear down the
road, she laid the book on the table, with a slip of paper to keep
the place, and hurried out to the grove. She found Henry leisurely
coming towards the house. "Where has he gone?" she inquired, with a
jerk of her shoulder towards the road.

"Mr. Allen?"

"Yes."

"How should I know?"

"Don't you know?"

"Maybe I do," said Henry, smiling at Sylvia with his smile of
affection and remembrance that she was a woman.

"Why don't you tell?"

"Now, Sylvia," said Henry, "you must remember that Mr. Allen is not a
child. He is a grown man, and if he takes it into his head to go
anywhere you can't say anything."

Sylvia looked at Henry with a baffled expression. "I think he might
spend his time a good deal more profitably Sunday afternoon than
sitting under the trees and smoking, or going walking," said she,
rashly and inconsequentially. "If he would only sit down and read
some good book."

"You can't dictate to Mr. Allen what he shall or shall not do," Henry
repeated.