laugh and the remark, "You can catch them if you run,"
and then he weakly submitted to his fate. After all, it was only an
accident which would hardly need a word of explanation. But what Irene
saw was this: a distant nod from Mrs. Glow, a cool survey and stare from
the Postlethwaite girls, and the failure of Mr. King to recognize his
friends any further than by an indifferent bow as he turned to speak to
another lady. In the raw state of her sensitiveness she felt all this as
a terrible and perhaps intended humiliation.

King did not return to the hotel till evening, and then he sent up his
card to the Bensons. Word came back that the ladies were packing, and
must be excused. He stood at the office desk and wrote a hasty note to
Irene, attempting an explanation of what might seem to her a rudeness,
and asked that he might see her a moment. And then he paced the corridor
waiting for a reply. In his impatience the fifteen minutes that he
waited seemed an hour. Then a bell-boy handed him this note:

"MY DEAR MR. KING,--No explanation whatever was needed. We never
shall forget your kindness. Good-by.
IRENE BENSON"

He folded the note carefully and put it in his breast pocket, took it
out and reread it, lingering over the fine and dainty signature, put it
back again, and walked out upon the piazza. It was a divine night,
soft and sweet-scented, and all the rustling trees were luminous in the
electric light. From a window opening upon a balcony overhead came the
clear notes of a barytone voice enunciating the oldfashioned words of an
English ballad, the refrain of which expressed hopeless separation.

The eastern coast, with its ragged outline of bays, headlands,
indentations, islands, capes, and sand-spits, from Watch Hill, a
favorite breezy resort, to Mount Desert, presents an almost continual
chain of hotels and summer cottages. In fact, the same may be said of
the whole Atlantic front from Mount Desert down to Cape May. It is to
the traveler an amazing spectacle. The American people can no longer
be reproached for not taking any summer recreation. The amount of money
invested to meet the requirements of this vacation idleness is enormous.
When one is on the coast in July or August it seems as if the whole
fifty millions of people had come down to lie on the rocks, wade in the
sand, and dip into the sea. But this is not the case. These crowds are
only a fringe of the pleasure-seeking popula