ut her cold fingers teasingly against his neck.

"Are you working hard?"

"Trying to. I am behind."

"But if there is a good wind this afternoon you are not to forget the
Carstangs' sail. They will be here only a day or two, and you mustn't
neglect them. Mrs. Carstang told me if I saw you first to invite you."

Maurice met the girl's smiling eyes, and the ice of her hand went
through him.

"Isn't Mrs. Carstang lovely! As soon as I saw you come in last night, I
knew she was--the other woman."

"You didn't look at me."

"I can see with my eyelashes. Do you know, I have often thought I should
love her if I were a man!"

There was not a trace of jealousy in Lily's gentle and perfect manner.

"You resemble her," said Maurice. "You have the blond head, and the same
features--only a little more delicate."

"I have been in her parlor all morning," said Lily. "We talked about
you. I am certain, Maurice, Mrs. Carstang is in her heart still faithful
to you."

That she should thrust the old love on him as a kind of solace seemed
the cruelest of all. There was no cognizance of anything except this one
maddening girl. She absorbed him. She wrung the strength of his manhood
from him as tribute, such tribute as everybody paid her, even Mrs.
Carstang. He sat like a rock, tranced by the strong control which he
kept over himself.

"I must go,"-said Lily. She had not sat down at all. Maurice shuffled
his papers.

"Good-bye," she spoke.

"Good-bye," he answered.

She did not ask, "Are you coming down the trail with me?" but ebbed
softly away, the swish of her silken petticoat subsiding on the grassy
avenue.

Her lover stretched his arms across the desk and sobbed upon them with
heart-broken gasps.

"It is killing me! It is killing me! And there is no escape. If I took
my life my disembodied ghost would follow her, less able to make itself
felt than now! I cannot live without her, and she is not for me--not for
me!"

He cursed the necessity which drove him out with the sailing party, and
the prodigal waste of life on neutral, trivial doings which cannot be
called living. He could see Lily with every pore of his body, and grew
faint keeping down a wild beast in him which desired to toss overboard
the men who crowded around her. She was more deliciously droll than
any comedienne, full of music and wit, the kind of spirit that rises
flood-tide with occasion. He was himself hilarious also during this
experience of saili