prize. There's lots of time before
dinner."

Archer acquiesced, and she turned the ponies down Narragansett Avenue,
crossed Spring Street and drove out toward the rocky moorland beyond.
In this unfashionable region Catherine the Great, always indifferent to
precedent and thrifty of purse, had built herself in her youth a
many-peaked and cross-beamed cottage-orne on a bit of cheap land
overlooking the bay. Here, in a thicket of stunted oaks, her verandahs
spread themselves above the island-dotted waters. A winding drive led
up between iron stags and blue glass balls embedded in mounds of
geraniums to a front door of highly-varnished walnut under a striped
verandah-roof; and behind it ran a narrow hall with a black and yellow
star-patterned parquet floor, upon which opened four small square rooms
with heavy flock-papers under ceilings on which an Italian
house-painter had lavished all the divinities of Olympus. One of these
rooms had been turned into a bedroom by Mrs. Mingott when the burden of
flesh descended on her, and in the adjoining one she spent her days,
enthroned in a large armchair between the open door and window, and
perpetually waving a palm-leaf fan which the prodigious projection of
her bosom kept so far from the rest of her person that the air it set
in motion stirred only the fringe of the anti-macassars on the
chair-arms.

Since she had been the means of hastening his marriage old Catherine
had shown to Archer the cordiality which a service rendered excites
toward the person served. She was persuaded that irrepressible passion
was the cause of his impatience; and being an ardent admirer of
impulsiveness (when it did not lead to the spending of money) she
always received him with a genial twinkle of complicity and a play of
allusion to which May seemed fortunately impervious.

She examined and appraised with much interest the diamond-tipped arrow
which had been pinned on May's bosom at the conclusion of the match,
remarking that in her day a filigree brooch would have been thought
enough, but that there was no denying that Beaufort did things
handsomely.

"Quite an heirloom, in fact, my dear," the old lady chuckled. "You
must leave it in fee to your eldest girl." She pinched May's white arm
and watched the colour flood her face. "Well, well, what have I said
to make you shake out the red flag? Ain't there going to be any
daughters--only boys, eh? Good gracious, look at her blushing again
a