ot, but that he was still inclined to think she was
thoroughly objectionable.

"Well, to-night at our party, you shall sit next to her," Stella
promised.

"Party?" interrogated Michael, in dismay.

"We're having a party in our rooms to-night."

"And this fellow Ayliffe is coming, I suppose?"

She nodded.

"And I shall have to meet him?"

She nodded again very cheerfully.

They went back to fetch Clarie out to lunch, but rather decently,
Michael was bound to admit, she made some excuse for not coming, so that
he and Stella were able to spend the afternoon together. It was a jolly
afternoon, for though Stella had closed her lips tightly to any more
confidences, she and Michael enjoyed themselves wandering in a
light-hearted dream, grasping continually at those airy bubbles of
vitality that floated upward sparkling from the debonair streets.

The party at the girls' rooms that evening seemed to Michael, almost
more than he cared to admit to the side of him conscious of being
Stella's brother, a recreation of ideal Bohemia. He knew the influence
of the rich August moon was responsible for most of the enchantment and
that the same people encountered earlier in the day in the full glare of
the sunlight would have seemed to him too keenly aware of the effect at
which they were aiming. But to resist their appeal, coming as they did
from the heart of Paris to this long riverside room with its lamps and
shadows, was impossible. Each couple that entered seemed to relinquish
slowly on the threshold a mysterious intimacy which set Michael's heart
beating in the imagination of what altitudes it might not have reached
along the path of romantic passions. Every young woman or young man who
entered solitary and paused in the doorway, blinking in search of
familiar faces, moved him with the respect owed by lay worldlings to
great artists. Masterpieces brooded over the apartment, and Michael
tolerated in his present mood of unqualified admiration personalities so
pretentious, so vain, so egotistical, as would in his ordinary temper
have plunged him into speechless gloom.

Oxford after this assembly of frank opinions and incarnate enthusiasms
seemed a colorless shelter for unfledged reactionaries, a nursery of
callow men in the street. Through the open windows the ponderous and
wise moon commented upon the scintillations of the outspread city whose
life reached this room in sound as emotionally melodious, as
romantically real