ilver kitten which had curled up in her lap. "I
wish I weren't such a--heathen," she said, suddenly. "I know what you
mean. But it is only the poetic sense in me that makes me know. I can't
_believe_ anything. Not about souls--or prayers. Do you ever pray?"

"Every night. On my knees."

"On your knees? Oh, is it as bad as that?"

* * * * *

Richard, writing to his mother, said of Marie-Louise, "Her mind isn't in
a healthy state. It hasn't anything to feed on. Her father is too busy
and her mother too ill to realize that she needs companionship of a
certain kind. I wish she might have been a pupil at the Crossroads
school, with Anne Warfield for her teacher. But no hope of that."

He wrote, too, of his rushing days, and Nancy, answering, hid from him
the utter hopelessness of her outlook. Her life began and ended with his
letters and the week-ends which he was able to give her. But some of his
week-ends had to be spent with Eve; a man cannot completely ignore the
fact that he has a fiancee, and Richard would have been less than human
if he had not responded to the appeal of youth and beauty. So he motored
with Eve and danced with Eve, and did all of the delightful summer things
which are possible in the big city near the sea. Aunt Maude went to the
North Shore, but Eve stayed with Winifred, and wove about Richard her
spells of flattery and of frivolity.

"I want to be near you, Dicky boy. If I'm not you'll work too hard."

"It is work that I like."

"I believe that you like it better than you do me, Dicky."

"Don't be silly, Eve."

"You are always saying that. Do you like your work better than you do me,
Dicky?"

"Of course not." But he had no pretty things to say.

The life that he lived with her, however, and with Pip and Winifred and
Tony was a heady wine which swept away regrets. He had no time to think.
He worked by day and played by night, and often after their play there
was work again. Now and then, as the Sunday night when he had first met
Marie-Louise, he motored with Austin out to Westchester. Mrs. Austin
spent her summers there. Long journeys tired her, and she would not leave
her husband. Marie-Louise stayed at "Rose Acres" because she hated big
hotels, and found cottage colonies stupid. The great gardens swept down
to the river--the wide, blue river with the high bluffs on the sunset
side.

The river at Bower's was not blue; it showed in the spring the red of th