e no reply, but put away her gardening gloves,
and then went to the sideboard and began to spread out an afternoon
cloth for tea.

"Enough to blow your head off, I say," said Miss Rosamund Hunt,
with the unruffled cheeriness of one whose songs and speeches
had always been safe for an encore.

"Only your hat, I think," said Diana Duke, "but I dare say that is
sometimes more important."

Rosamund's face showed for an instant the offence of a
spoilt child, and then the humour of a very healthy person.
She broke into a laugh and said, "Well, it would have to be a big
wind to blow your head off."

There was another silence; and the sunset breaking more and more from
the sundering clouds, filled the room with soft fire and painted the dull
walls with ruby and gold.

"Somebody once told me," said Rosamund Hunt, "that it's easier
to keep one's head when one has lost one's heart."

"Oh, don't talk such rubbish," said Diana with savage sharpness.

Outside, the garden was clad in a golden splendour;
but the wind was still stiffly blowing, and the three men
who stood their ground might also have considered the problem
of hats and heads. And, indeed, their position, touching hats,
was somewhat typical of them. The tallest of the three abode
the blast in a high silk hat, which the wind seemed to charge
as vainly as that other sullen tower, the house behind him.
The second man tried to hold on a stiff straw hat at all angles,
and ultimately held it in his hand. The third had no hat, and,
by his attitude, seemed never to have had one in his life.
Perhaps this wind was a kind of fairy wand to test men and women,
for there was much of the three men in this difference.

The man in the solid silk hat was the embodiment of silkiness and solidity.
He was a big, bland, bored and (as some said) boring man, with flat
fair hair and handsome heavy features; a prosperous young doctor
by the name of Warner. But if his blondness and blandness seemed
at first a little fatuous, it is certain that he was no fool.
If Rosamund Hunt was the only person there with much money,
he was the only person who had as yet found any kind of fame.
His treatise on "The Probable Existence of Pain in the Lowest Organisms"
had been universally hailed by the scientific world as at once solid
and daring. In short, he undoubtedly had brains; and perhaps it was
not his fault if they were the kind of brains that most men desire
to analyze with a poker.

The