e man continued to gaze at him, and John, feeling his face grow hot,
stared back.

Then the man flicked the ash from his cigarette, turned lazily in his
chair and raised his hand as a signal to a servant who was hovering over
a table and who hurried to him in response. He spoke to the servant and
inclined his head slightly in John's direction. The servant bowed and
came toward John's table.

"If you're not a guest here, sir, you will kindly leave the grounds," he
said.

John felt his blood gush through his veins. He saw the man in the wicker
chair smile mildly and look up into the branches of the tree overhead.
He overcame a wild impulse to step over and ruin the perfect hair.

"But it happens I am a guest," he said, as clearly as his choked back
temper permitted.

"You are, sir!" the servant pretended astonished humiliation. "Would you
be so good as to say by whose invitation?"

Then it happened. John afterwards was never quite sure what would have
taken place there had it not occurred.

To John she seemed to have blossomed up out of the ground before them.
He never saw anyone who looked more like a flower, a delicate, beautiful
flower. She was in white, a quaint frock with ridiculously tiny puffed
sleeves reaching only halfway to her elbows, gathered in with a narrow
black ribbon. Something about her, the way she looked, the dress, the
whole expression of her face, sent the thought "an old-fashioned girl"
coursing through John's brain.

The servant stepped back.

"Do you happen to be the newspaper reporter--?" she said.

John nodded.

"Then I am so glad to have found you. Mrs. Randolph felt she was rather
abrupt when you asked to see her and when she noticed you walking
rapidly away she feared you were offended. I volunteered to find you."
She was in the chair beside him.

"You are very kind and I am very happy," he managed to say. "I wasn't
offended. I was embarrassed and frightened."

"By what?"

"By all this. The servant asked me if I was a tradesman--whatever that
is--isn't that enough to frighten anyone?"

"I've read stories of reporters who never knew fear. And in plays the
reporter always does the bravest things."

"In stories and in plays," he repeated. "This, too, is like a story or a
play. Here I am rescued by a heroine who is--who is----"

"Who is what?"

"Beautiful." The word was no sooner spoken than he could have bitten off
his tongue.

He hoped she would laugh it away, but she