talking about me this morning!"
she cried.

He shook his head. "It was only a chance shot," he told her. "I'm sorry
if it came close enough home to hurt. But there couldn't be a better
day-dream than that and there's no reason I can see why it shouldn't come
reasonably true, if you'll honestly try for as much of it as you can get.
That's the prescription, anyhow. Give up nobility and all the heroic
poses that go with it and practise a little enlightened selfishness
instead. Perhaps by force of example you may persuade John Wollaston to
abandon about half of his conscience. Then you _would_ be settled."

With that he went back to his score and by no protest or expostulation
could she provoke another word out of him. She fidgeted about the room
for a quarter of an hour or so. Then with the announcement that she was
going to dress, left it and went up-stairs.

When she came down a while later in street things and a hat she presented
him with a new perplexity.

"I've been trying everywhere I can think of to get a car," she said, "and
there simply isn't one to be had. I even tried to borrow one."

He asked her what she wanted of a car. Where she wanted to go.

"Oh, can't you see!" she cried, "I don't want to send for John again to
come to me. I want to go to him. It's too maddening!"

"Well," he said, with a grin, "if you really want--desperately--to go to
him, of course there's the trolley."

She stared at him for a moment and then perceiving, or thinking she
perceived, something allegorical about the suggestion, she gave a laugh,
swooped down and kissed him and went.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE KALEIDOSCOPE

It was the next Sunday morning that Miss Wollaston, who had decided to
stay in town even though the emergency she had been summoned to meet was
found mysteriously to have evanesced when she arrived, asked Wallace
Hood, walking home with her from church, to come in to lunch.

"I haven't the least idea," she said, "whether we shall be quite by
ourselves or whether the entire family, including the latest addition to
it, will come straggling in before we've finished."

She would not have considered it quite delicate to have owned to him how
very clearly she hoped to have him, for an hour or two, all to herself.
He would be found, she was confident, not to have gone through the
looking-glass into the world of topsy-turvey that all the rest of them
seemed to be inhabiting, these days. It would be comforting t