her, "you don't in the least know what you are talking about. It is not
a fit of anger on Barbara Drew's part. It is a serious conviction."

"A conviction which can be changed," the girl broke in.

"Not at all." Brewster took it up. "She has no faith in me. She thinks
I'm an ass."

"Perhaps she's right," she exclaimed, a little hot. "Perhaps you have
never discovered that girls say many things to hide their emotions.
Perhaps you don't realize what feverish, exclamatory, foolish things
girls are. They don't know how to be honest with the men they love, and
they wouldn't if they did. You are little short of an idiot, Monty
Brewster, if you believed the things she said rather than the things
she looked."

And Peggy, fiery and determined and defiantly unhappy, threw down her
cards and escaped so that she might not prove herself tearfully
feminine. She left Brewster still heavily enveloped in melancholy; but
she left him puzzled. He began to wonder if Barbara Drew did have
something in the back of her mind. Then he found his thoughts wandering
off toward Peggy and her defiance. He had only twice before seen her in
that mood, and he liked it. He remembered how she had lost her temper
once when she was fifteen, and hated a girl he admired. Suddenly he
laughed aloud at the thought of the fierce little picture she had made,
and the gloom, which had been so sedulously cultivated, was dissipated
in a moment. The laugh surprised the man who brought in some letters.
One of them was from "Nopper" Harrison, and gave him all the private
news. The ball was to be given at mid-Lent, which arrived toward the
end of March, and negotiations were well under way for the chartering
of the "Flitter," the steam-yacht belonging to Reginald Brown, late of
Brown & Brown.

The letter made Brewster chafe under the bonds of inaction. His affairs
were getting into a discouraging state. The illness was certain to
entail a loss of more than $50,000 to his business. His only
consolation came through Harrison's synopsis of the reports from
Gardner, who was managing the brief American tour of the Viennese
orchestra. Quarrels and dissensions were becoming every-day
embarrassments, and the venture was an utter failure from a financial
point of view. Broken contracts and lawsuits were turning the tour into
one continuous round of losses, and poor Gardner was on the point of
despair. From the beginning, apparently, the concerts had been marked
for disast