s the same girl."

"She is engaged to some young man in an office in Flodmouth, I
believe," said Laura. "I wonder if you could do anything for him?"

"I'm afraid not. We don't interfere in each other's office
arrangements in Flodmouth business circles," he said, teasing her,
though he saw and appreciated that kindness always welling up in her
like a spring, ready for every one. "All right, old girl. If I have a
chance, I'll do what I can," he added, "but the youth only looks about
nineteen, so they have plenty of time yet."

"Nobody has too much time to be happy in," said Laura, smiling at her
lover. "Fancy, if we had fallen in love with each other and married
ten years ago, we should have been all that to the good."

He laughed. "We might have been all that to the bad," he said. "You
don't know what I was like at nineteen, Laura."

So they went along, very happy, laughing and talking together, viewed
with envy, contempt or sympathy by the girls and women who read and
worked round the band-stand. A thin stream of music drifted out with a
sort of melancholy sprightliness to join the deep sound of waves
breaking and drawing back from the gravel on the sands. In the
distance Caroline looked out from her little window at Wilson's broad
back and hated them both, in spite of Laura's kindness. They'd
everything--everything. What right had one girl to have so much more
than another? . . . Then a bevy of children came through the barrier,
and when she next looked the lovers had vanished.

But later in the morning when Wilson returned home alone by way of the
promenade, he glanced at Caroline in passing the barrier with the
faintest renewed stirring of curiosity. Surely there must have been
something--he couldn't quite have imagined it _all_ that night at the
dance. Then he saw a bill near the gate announcing another dance this
week, and that made him say lightly, as he went through the iron
turnstile: "Shall you be at the dance on Thursday? You ought to wear
that red dress again."

"No, I aren't--I'm not going to wear the dress any more." She spoke
rudely, abruptly--saying to herself that this was what she had expected.

He read her thoughts with ease, smiling to himself, for he knew
something about women. But as he looked at her closely in the strong
light, he became aware of a velvety texture in her skin which is
usually seen only in children. She had a powdering of freckles on her
nose, and her pupi