ock buzzing about. Secondly,
that since 'misfortunes come not single spies, but in battalions,' there
are probably a flock of Jimmies. By the by, will you swim out here with
me to-morrow morning?"

"To-morrow morning," she demurred. "I believe I have an engagement for a
horseback ride with Billy Stirling. We're going to look at a wind mill
or something."

The man shook his head in mock distress.

"I knew it," he sighed, then his tone grew serious and he began to speak
rapidly. "You say I've known where you were for six years and that's
true. It's also true that until this summer, I haven't in any genuine
sense been the master of my movements. Four years were spent in college,
and two in law school. There were vacations, of course, but my mother
claimed them at home. She is dead now, and her last few years were years
of partial invalidism--so she wanted her family about her."

"Oh," the girl's eyes deepened with sympathy. "I didn't know that. She
was, I think, almost the loveliest woman I ever knew. She was everything
that blue blood ought to be--and so rarely is."

"Thank you. Yes, I think my mother was just that--but what I meant to
claim was that this summer is the first I have been free to use in
whatever way I wanted: the first time I've been able to say to myself,
'Go and do whatever seems to you the most delightful thing possible in a
delightful world.' What I did was to come to Cape Cod and why I did it
I've already told you."

Conscience studied his expression and back of the whimsical glint in his
eyes she recognized an entire sincerity. Perhaps he had retained out of
boyhood some of that militant attitude of believing in his dreams and
making them realities. She found herself hoping something of the sort as
she reminded him, "After I had outgrown pigtails, you know, they would
have let me read a letter from you--if it had arrived."

"Certainly. There were a good many times when I started to write; a good
many times when I got as far as a half-finished letter. But I always
tore it up. You see, it never appeared to me that that was the way. A
letter from me, after a long absence would have been a shadowy sort of
message. I couldn't guess how clearly you remembered me or even whether
you remembered me at all. You were a child then, who was growing into a
woman. Your life was an edifice which you were building for yourself.
What niches it had for what saints and deities, I couldn't hope to know.
I might ha