second.

"Aw, stop yer kiddin'," he said. "All I can say now is that if you try
to wake 'em up now they 'll set the dogs on you."

"Very well, let them," interposed Mrs. Wellington. "Now drive on as
quickly as possible--and no more talking, please."

The driver had a good look at her as she spoke. His round face became
red and pale in turn and he clucked asthmatically to his horse.

"Good Lord," he muttered, "it's herself!"

But he had not much farther to go. Just as they turned into the Harbor
Road, a Wellington car came up. The _mecanicien_ had been losing no
time, but when he caught sight of the Wellingtons he stopped within a
distance which he prided himself was five feet less than any other
living driver could have made it in, without breaking the car.

The footman was at the side of the hack in an instant and assisted the
mother and daughter into the tonneau, which they entered in silence.
Mrs. Wellington, in fact, did not speak until the car was tearing past
the golf grounds. Here she turned to her daughter with a grim face.

"Anne," she said, "I 've about made up my mind that you escaped being
really funny with that impossible hackman."

"Yes, mother," said the girl, absently viewing the steadily rising roof
of her home. "Our ideas of humor were ever alien. I wonder if Prince
Koltsoff has arrived."

The Crags was one of the few Newport villas bordering on the sea, whose
owners and architects had been sufficiently temperamental to take
advantage of the natural beauties of its site. Upon huge black rocks,
rising twenty-five or thirty feet, the house had been built. Windows
on either side looked down upon the waters, ever shattering into white
foam on half-hidden reefs, or rushing relentlessly into rocky,
weed-hung fissures or black caverns. Sometimes in the autumn storms
when the inrushing waves would bury deep the grim reefs off Bateman's
Point and pile themselves on the very bulwarks of the island, the spray
rattled against the windows of The Crags and made the place seem a part
of the elemental fury.

In front of the house was an immense stretch of sward, bordered with
box and relieved by a wonderful _parterre_ and by walks and drives
lined with blue hydrangeas. The stable, garage, and gardener's cottage
were far to one side, all but their roofs concealed from the house and
the roadway by a small grove of poplars.

Supplementing the processes of Nature by artificial means, Ronald
Wellin