id not follow it up.

"I see his sister over there. Betty is a dear girl. That's she talking
to Stubby. Come over and meet her. They've been up on their island for a
long time, while the flu raged."

MacRae couldn't very well avoid it without seeming rude or making an
explanation which he did not intend to make to any one. His grudge
against the Gower clan was focused on Horace Gower. His feeling had not
abated a jot. But it was a personal matter, something to remain locked
in his own breast. So he perforce went with Nelly Abbott and was duly
presented to Miss Elizabeth Gower. And he had the next dance with her,
also for convention's sake.

While they stood chatting a moment, the four of them, Stubby said to
MacRae:

"Who are you with, Jack?"

"The Robbin-Steeles."

"If I don't get a chance to talk to you again, come out to the house
to-morrow," Stubby said. "The mater said so, and I want to talk to you
about something."

The music began and MacRae and Betty Gower slid away in the one-step,
that most conversational of dances. But Jack couldn't find himself
chatty with Betty Gower. She was graceful and clear-eyed, a vigorously
healthy girl with a touch of color in her cheeks that came out of
Nature's rouge pot. But MacRae was subtly conscious of a stiffness
between them.

"After all," Betty said abruptly, when they had circled half the room,
"it was worth fighting for, don't you really think?"

For a second MacRae looked down at her, puzzled. Then he remembered.

"Good Heavens!" he said, "is that still bothering you? Do you take
everything a fellow says so seriously as that?"

"No. It wasn't so much what you said as the way you said it," she
replied. "You were uncompromisingly hostile that day, for some reason.
Have you acquired a more equable outlook since?"

"I'm trying," he answered.

"You need coaching in the art of looking on the bright side of things,"
she smiled.

"Such as clusters of frosted lights, cut glass, diamonds, silk dresses
and ropes of pearls," he drawled. "Would you care to take on the
coaching job, Miss Gower?"

"I might be persuaded." She looked him frankly in the eyes.

But MacRae would not follow that lead, whatever it might mean. Betty
Gower was nice,--he had to admit it. To glide around on a polished floor
with his arm around her waist, her soft hand clasped in his, and her
face close to his own, her grayish-blue eyes, which were so very like
his own, now smiling and now sob