go. "It will be like watching a play."

She and Richard were waiting for Pip's "Mermaid" to make a landing at the
pier at Rose Acres. A man-servant with their bags stood near, and
Marie-Louise's maid was coated and hatted to accompany her mistress. "It
will be like watching a play," Marie-Louise repeated. "The eternal trio.
Two men and a girl."

She waved to the quartette on the forward deck. "Your big man looks fine
in his yachting things. And your Eve is nice in white."

Marie-Louise was not in white. In spite of the heat she was wrapped to
the ears in a great coat of pale buff. On her head was a Chinese hat of
yellow straw, with a peacock's feather. Yet in spite of the blueness and
yellowness, and the redness of her head, she preserved that air of
amazing coolness, as if her blood were mixed with snow and ran slowly.

Arriving on deck, she gave Pip her hand. "I am glad it is clear. I hate
storms. I am going to ask Dr. Brooks to pray that it won't be rough. He
is a good man, and the gods should listen."

CHAPTER XVII

_In Which Fear Walks in a Storm._

THE "Mermaid," having swept like a bird out of the harbor, stopped at
Coney Island. Marie-Louise wanted her fortune told. Eve wanted peanuts
and pop-corn. "It will make me seem a little girl again."

Marie-Louise, cool in her buff coat, shrugged her shoulders. "I was never
allowed to be that kind of a little girl," she said, "but I think I'd
like to try it for a day."

Eve and Marie-Louise got on very well together. They spoke the same
language. And if Marie-Louise was more artificial in some ways, she was
more open than Eve.

"You'd better tell Dr. Brooks," she told the older girl, as the two of
them walked ahead of Richard and Pip on the pier. Tony and Winifred had
elected to stay on board.

"Tell him what?"

"That you are keeping the big man in reserve."

Eve flushed. "Marie-Louise, you're horrid."

"I am honest," was the calm response.

Pip bought them unlimited peanuts and pop-corn, and Marie-Louise piloted
them to the tent of a fat Armenian who told fortunes.

In spite of his fatness, however, he was immaculate in European clothing;
he charged exorbitantly and achieved extraordinary results.

"He said the last time that I should marry a poet," Marie-Louise informed
them, "which isn't true. I am not going to be married at all. But it
amuses me to hear him."

The black eyes of the fat Armenian twinkled. "There will be a time when
you w