ill I've got
something to show for myself. I'm not getting on at all, you know. This
year has been mostly wasted."

"You're stale; that's what's the matter with you. And just now you're
dead tired. You'll talk more rationally after you've had some tea. Rest
your throat until it comes." They were sitting by a window. As Ottenburg
looked at her in the gray light, he remembered what Mrs. Nathanmeyer had
said about the Swedish face "breaking early." Thea was as gray as the
weather. Her skin looked sick. Her hair, too, though on a damp day it
curled charmingly about her face, looked pale.

Fred beckoned the waiter and increased his order for food. Thea did not
hear him. She was staring out of the window, down at the roof of the Art
Institute and the green lions, dripping in the rain. The lake was all
rolling mist, with a soft shimmer of robin's-egg blue in the gray. A
lumber boat, with two very tall masts, was emerging gaunt and black out
of the fog. When the tea came Thea ate hungrily, and Fred watched her.
He thought her eyes became a little less bleak. The kettle sang
cheerfully over the spirit lamp, and she seemed to concentrate her
attention upon that pleasant sound. She kept looking toward it
listlessly and indulgently, in a way that gave him a realization of her
loneliness. Fred lit a cigarette and smoked thoughtfully. He and Thea
were alone in the quiet, dusky room full of white tables. In those days
Chicago people never stopped for tea. "Come," he said at last, "what
would you do this summer, if you could do whatever you wished?"

"I'd go a long way from here! West, I think. Maybe I could get some of
my spring back. All this cold, cloudy weather,"--she looked out at the
lake and shivered,--"I don't know, it does things to me," she ended
abruptly.

Fred nodded. "I know. You've been going down ever since you had
tonsilitis. I've seen it. What you need is to sit in the sun and bake
for three months. You've got the right idea. I remember once when we
were having dinner somewhere you kept asking me about the Cliff-Dweller
ruins. Do they still interest you?"

"Of course they do. I've always wanted to go down there--long before I
ever got in for this."

"I don't think I told you, but my father owns a whole canyon full of
Cliff-Dweller ruins. He has a big worthless ranch down in Arizona, near
a Navajo reservation, and there's a canyon on the place they call
Panther Canyon, chock full of that sort of thing. I often go