t, hugging it for a little altogether to herself, her very
own, shared as yet by no one,--it was while she sat there, that people
out of doors in Acapulco itself, along the main roads, out in the
country towards Zamora on the north and San Blas on the south, became
suddenly aware of new signposts.

They hadn't been there the day before. They all turned towards the spot
at the foot of the mountains where Pepper Lane was. They all pointed,
with a long white finger, in that direction. And on them all was written
in plain, sea-blue letters, beneath which the distance in miles or
fractions of a mile was clearly marked, _To The Open Arms_.

Curiosity was roused at last. People meeting each other in Main Street
stopped to talk about these Arms wondered where and what they were, and
decided to follow the signposts that afternoon in their cars and track
them down. They made up parties to go and track together. It would be a
relief to have something a little different to do. What on earth could
The Open Arms be? Hopes were expressed that they weren't something
religious. Awful to follow signposts out into the country only to find
they landed you in a meeting-house.

At lunch in the hotels, and everywhere where people were together, the
signposts were discussed. Miss Heap heard them being discussed from her
solitary table, but was so much taken up with her own exciting thoughts
that she hardly noticed. After lunch, however, as she was passing out of
the restaurant, still full of her unshared news and still uncertain as
to whom she should tell it first, Mr. Ridding called out from his table
and said he supposed she was going too.

They had been a little chilly to each other since the afternoon of the
conversation with the Twinklers, but he would have called out to any one
at that moment. He was sitting waiting while Mrs. Ridding finished her
lunch, his own lunch finished long ago, and was in the condition of
muffled but extreme exasperation which the unoccupied watching of Mrs.
Ridding at meals produced. Every day three times this happened, that Mr.
Ridding got through his meal first by at least twenty minutes and then
sat trying not to mind Mrs. Ridding. She wasn't aware of these efforts.
They would greatly have shocked her; for to try not to mind one's wife
surely isn't what decent, loving husbands ever have to do.

"Going where?" asked Miss Heap, stopping by the table; whereupon Mr.
Ridding had the slight relief of getting u