u've told
me all I wanted to know."

Mrs. Ennis waved toward the piano. "There's Blais Rochefort's
photograph," she retorted in tones of good-humored exasperation. "Go
over and look at it."

"I will."

Burnaby's black shoulders, bent above the photograph, were for a moment
the object of a pensive regard. Mrs. Ennis sighed. "Your presence makes
me puritanical," she observed. "I have always felt that the best way for
any one to get over Pollens was to go through with them and forget
them."

Burnaby spoke without turning his head.

"He's good-looking."

"Very."

"A real man."

"Decidedly! Very brave and very cultivated."

"He waxes his mustache."

"Yes, even brave men do that occasionally."

"I should think," said Burnaby thoughtfully, putting the photograph
down, "that he might be worth a woman's hanging on to."

Mrs. Ennis got up, crossed over to the piano, and leaned an elbow upon
it, resting her cheek in the palm of her upturned hand and smiling at
Burnaby.

"Don't let's be so serious," she said. "What business is it of ours?"
She turned her head away and began to play with the petals of a near-by
jonquil. "Spring is a restless time, isn't it?"

It seemed to her that the most curious little silence followed this
speech of hers, and yet she knew that in actual time it was nothing, and
felt that it existed probably only in her own heart. She heard the clock
on the mantelpiece across the room ticking; far off, the rattle of a
taxicab. The air coming through the open window bore the damp, stirring
smell of early grass.

"Madame De Rochefort and Mr. Pollen!" announced a voice.

Mrs. Ennis had once said that her young friend, Mimi de Rochefort,
responded to night more brilliantly than almost any other woman she
knew. The description was apt. Possibly by day there was a pallor too
lifeless, a nose a trifle too short and arrogant, lips, possibly, too
full; but by night these discrepancies blended into something very near
perfection, and back of them as well was a delicate illumination as of
lanterns hung in trees beneath stars; an illumination due to youth, and
to very large dark eyes, and to dark, soft hair and red lips. Nor with
this beauty went any of the coolness or abrupt languor with which the
modern young hide their eagerness.

Mary Rochefort was quite simple beneath her habitual reserve; frank and
appealing and even humorous at times, as if startled out of her usual
mood of reflective quiet by