f a detective officer, every hotel in Boston, a
hack was rattling over the stones to Chelsea Ferry, bearing to their
bridal home Laurence Thorndyke and Norine.

CHAPTER X.

"A FOOL'S PARADISE."

The little house was like a picture--like a doll's house, the whitest,
the brightest, the trimmest, the tiniest of all tiny houses. It nestled
down in a sheltered nook, with its back set comfortably against a hill.
Its pretty little garden full of pretty little flowers, climbing roses
and scarlet-runners all over its inviting porch, and away beyond,
Chelsea beach, like a strip of silver ribbon, and the dimpling sea,
smiling back the sunshine. No other house within a quarter of a mile,
the dim, dark woodland rising up in the back-ground, the big, bustling,
work-a-day world shut out on every hand. Could Laurence Thorndyke, if he
had searched for half a lifetime, have found a more charming, more
secluded spot in which to dream out Love's Young Dream?

And the dream was pretty nearly dreamed out now.

For the fourth week had come, and the days of the honey month were
drawing to a close. If the truth must be told, the honey had cloyed upon
Mr. Thorndyke's fastidious palate before the end of the second week, had
grown distasteful ere the end of the third--had palled entirely at the
beginning of the fourth. In other words, the honeymoon business and
doing "love in a cottage," buried alive here, was fast becoming a most
horrible bore.

"If I had been very much in love with the girl," thought Mr. Thorndyke,
communing with his own heart "it might have been different--even then,
though, let it have been ever so severe a case of spoons, I don't think
I could have stood another week of this deadly lively sort of thing. But
I wasn't very much in love. If you know yourself, Laurence Thorndyke,
and you flatter yourself you do, it isn't in you to get up a _grande
passion_ for any body. There was Lucy West, there is Helen Holmes, here
is Norine Bourdon. I don't believe you ever had more than a passing
fancy for any of them, and your motto ever has been 'lightly won lightly
lost.'"

He was lying upon a sofa, stretched at full length, his hands clasped
behind his head, a cloud of cigar smoke half-veiling his handsome, lazy,
bored face, his eyes fixed dreamily upon the sparkling sea. Down on the
strip of tawny sand he could see Norine, looking like a Dresden china
shepherdess in her white looped-up dress, some blue drapery caught abo