s friends, and among them his mother had
doubtless selected some fastidious maiden who had never encountered
disgraceful moments.

"I belong to myself," thought Geraldine proudly, forcing back some
stinging drops, salt as the vast waters before her. "I don't need
anybody, I don't." She fought down again the memory of her lover's
embraces. Ever afterward she remembered those few minutes alone on the
piazza at Rockcrest, overwhelmed by the sensation of contrast between
herself on sufferance in her cheap raiment, and the indications all
about her of the opposite extreme of luxury--remembered those moments as
affording her a poignant unhappiness.

"I won't ask you to come into the cottage," said Mrs. Barry, approaching
at the close of her interview. "The rugs haven't been unrolled yet, and
it is all in disorder. Isn't that a superb show of sky and sea, and
never twice alike?"

"Superb," echoed Geraldine.

"You are shivering," said her hostess. "It is many degrees colder here
than over in the sheltered place where Miss Upton has her shop. I have
quite finished. Let us go back."

They went down to the car and were soon speeding toward Keefe. Beside
Lamson sat the imposing hatbox. Somehow it added to Geraldine's
unhappiness, as if jeering at her for an effort to appear what she was
not.

She must talk. Her regal companion would suspect her wretchedness.

"What are you going to make your curtains of, Mrs. Barry?" she asked.

The commonplace proved a most felicitous question. The lady described
material, took her measurements out of her purse, and discussed ruffles
and tucks and described location and size of windows, during which talk
the young girl was able to throw off the spell that had held her mute.

She did not suspect how her companion was listening with discriminating
ears to her speech, and the very tones of her voice, and watching with
discriminating eyes her manner and expression. Ben had told his mother
to take her magnifying glass and she had begun to use it.

When the motor entered the home grounds at Keefe, Geraldine resisted the
associations of her last arrival there. A faint mist of apple blossoms
still clung in spots to the orchard.

Lamson carried her poor little effects and the hateful, grandiose hatbox
into the living-room where one day she had regained her scattered
senses.

"You may take these things up to the blue room," Mrs. Barry said to the
maid who appeared, "and you will give Miss Mel