miled on him with
unfeigned approval, turned and presented him to the others--Miss Aulne,
Miss Swift, Miss Annan, a Mr. Cameron, and, a moment later, to her
husband, Gordon Collis, a good-looking, deeply sun-burned young man
whose only passion, except his wife and baby, was Ashuelyn, the home of
his father.

But it was a quiet passion which bored nobody, not even his wife.

When conversation became general, with Querida as the centre around
which it eddied, Neville, who had seated himself on the gray stone
parapet near his sister, said in a low voice:

"Well, how goes it, Lily?"

"All right," she replied with boyish directness, but in the same low
tone. "Mother and father have spent a week with us. You saw them in
town?"

"Of course. I'll run up to Spindrift House to see them as often as I can
this summer.... How's the kid?"

"Fine. Do you want to see him?"

"Yes, I'd like to."

His sister caught his hand, jumped up, and led him into the house to the
nursery where a normal and in nowise extraordinary specimen of infancy
reposed in a cradle, pink with slumber, one thumb inserted in its mouth.

"Isn't he a wonder," murmured Neville, venturing to release the thumb.

The young mother bent over, examining her offspring in all the eloquent
silence of pride unutterable. After a little while she said: "I've got
to feed him. Go back to the others, Louis, and say I'll be down after a
while."

He sauntered back through the comfortable but modest house, glancing
absently about him on his way to the terrace, nodding to familiar faces
among the servants, stopping to inspect a sketch of his own which he had
done long ago and which his sister loved and he hated.

"Rotten," he murmured--"it has an innocence about it that is actually
more offensive than stupidity."

On the terrace Stephanie Swift came over to him:

"Do you want a single at tennis, Louis? The others are hot for
Bridge--except Gordon Collis--and he is going to dicker with a farmer
over some land he wants to buy."

Neville looked at the others:

"Do you mean to say that you people are going to sit here all hunched up
around a table on a glorious day like this?"

"We are," said Alexander Cameron, calmly breaking the seal of two fresh,
packs. "You artists have nothing to do for a living except to paint
pretty models, and when the week end comes you're in fine shape to caper
and cut up didoes. But we business men are too tired to go galumphing
over the g