't know how you can, Dicky," she smiled at him forlornly. "I've
got a bad black heart, and I play the wrong kind of games."

"Well, I see through them, so it's all right. What's this about
Nancy?"

"I'll tell you later," Betty said; "there she comes now."

Nancy, stimulated by massage and steam, her hair dressed by a
professional; powdered, and for the first time in her life rouged to
hide the tell-tale absence of her natural quickening color, came
forward to meet her guests in supreme unconsciousness of the pathos of
the effect she had achieved. She was dressed in snowy white like a
bride,--the only gown she had that was in keeping with the holiday
decorations, and she moved a little clumsily, as if her brain had
found itself suddenly in charge of an unfamiliar set of reflexes. Her
lids drooped over burning eyes that had known no sleep for many
nights, and every line and lineament of her face was stamped with
pain.

"I'm so sorry to have kept you waiting," she said. Her voice,
curiously, was the only natural thing about her. "I've been scouring
off every vestige of my work-a-day self, and that takes time. Thank
you for the roses, Dick, but the only flowers I could have worn with
this color scheme would have been geraniums."

"I'll send you some geraniums to-morrow."

"Don't," she said. "How do you do, Preston?"

She gave him a cold hand, and he stared at her almost as he had stared
at Betty. He was a tall grave-looking youth, with Caroline's straight
features and olive coloring, and a shock of heavy blond hair.

"I hope you'll like your party," Nancy hurried on. "Gaspard is
bursting with pride in it. I think it would be a nice thing to have
him in and drink his health after the coffee. He would never forget
the honor."

"My God!" Dick said in an undertone to Betty, "how long has she been
like this?"

"I'll tell you later," she promised him again.

With the serving of the first course of dinner--Gaspard's wonderful
_Puree Mongol_--an artist's dream of all the most delicate vegetables
in the world mingled together as the clouds are mingled, the tensity
in the air seemed to break and shatter about them in showers of
brilliant, artificial mirth, which presently, because they were all
young and fond of one another and their group had the habit of
intimacy, became less and less strained and unreal.

Nancy's tired eyes lost something of their unnatural glitter, and
Betty seemed more of a woman than a scarlet s