room to the
smaller one of the suite and out on a broad sleeping-porch. The casement
was nearly waist high, and he stood grasping the ledge and looking with
unseeing eyes into a grove of firs. So this was the alternative. And this
was why Foster was safe. The young mining engineer, with little besides
his pay, had fallen far short of her price.

But the salt wind was in his face; it quieted him. He began to notice the
many small intruding influences of approaching night. The bough of a
resinous hemlock, soughing gently, touched his arm, and his hold on the
shingles relaxed. He moved, to rest the injured hand on the casing, and
its throbbing eased. His glance singled out clumps of changing maple or
dogwood that flamed like small fires on the slope. Then he caught the
rhythm of the tide, breaking far down along the rocky bulkhead; and above,
where a footbridge spanned a chasm, a cascade rippled in harmony.

"Nice, isn't it?" said the lieutenant, who came onto the porch with
Elizabeth.

"That is a pergola they are building down there," she explained. "It's to
be covered with Virginia creeper and wistaria and all sorts of climbing
things. And French doors open into it from the dining-room. A walk winds
up from the end--you see it, Mr. Tisdale?--across the footbridge to a
pavilion on the point. It is almost too dark to see the roof among the
trees. Mrs. Weatherbee calls it the observatory, because we have such a
long sweep of the Sound from there, north and south. You'd think you were
aboard a ship at sea, lieutenant, in stormy weather. It gets every wind
that blows."

The lieutenant wished to go to the pavilion, but Tisdale excused himself
from joining them, and was left alone again with his thoughts. Then he was
conscious the other women had remained in the apartment. They had come
into the inner room, and Mrs. Feversham, having found an electric button,
flooded the interior with light. On the balcony a blue bulb glowed.
Tisdale turned a little more and, leaning on the casement, waited for them
to come through the open door.

"What do you say to furnishing this suite in bird's-eye maple?" asked
Marcia. "With rugs and portieres in old blue."

Mrs. Weatherbee shaded her dazzled eyes with her hand and looked
critically around. "The maple would be lovely," she said, "but--do you
know," and she turned to her companion with an engaging smile, "these
sunrise rooms seem meant for Alaska cedar? And the rugs should be not old