xecuting a tripping, running step to one
side, was striking the tethered ball with her racquet. "They are hard
at it, as usual. Two such romps!"

She surveyed them with pleased motherly interest, which Cowperwood
considered did her much credit. He was thinking that it would be too
bad if her hopes for her children should not be realized. Yet possibly
they might not be. Life was very grim. How strange, he thought, was
this type of woman--at once a sympathetic, affectionate mother and a
panderer to the vices of men. How strange that she should have these
children at all. Berenice had on a white skirt, white tennis-shoes, a
pale-cream silk waist or blouse, which fitted her very loosely.
Because of exercise her color was high--quite pink--and her dusty,
reddish hair was blowy. Though they turned into the hedge gate and
drove to the west entrance, which was at one side of the house, there
was no cessation of the game, not even a glance from Berenice, so busy
was she.

He was merely her mother's friend to her. Cowperwood noted, with
singular vividness of feeling, that the lines of her movements--the
fleeting, momentary positions she assumed--were full of a wondrous
natural charm. He wanted to say so to Mrs. Carter, but restrained
himself.

"It's a brisk game," he commented, with a pleased glance. "You play,
do you?"

"Oh, I did. I don't much any more. Sometimes I try a set with Rolfe
or Bevy; but they both beat me so badly."

"Bevy? Who is Bevy?"

"Oh, that's short of Berenice. It's what Rolfe called her when he was
a baby."

"Bevy! I think that rather nice."

"I always like it, too. Somehow it seems to suit her, and yet I don't
know why."

Before dinner Berenice made her appearance, freshened by a bath and
clad in a light summer dress that appeared to Cowperwood to be all
flounces, and the more graceful in its lines for the problematic
absence of a corset. Her face and hands, however--a face thin, long,
and sweetly hollow, and hands that were slim and sinewy--gripped and
held his fancy. He was reminded in the least degree of Stephanie; but
this girl's chin was firmer and more delicately, though more
aggressively, rounded. Her eyes, too, were shrewder and less evasive,
though subtle enough.

"So I meet you again," he observed, with a somewhat aloof air, as she
came out on the porch and sank listlessly into a wicker chair.
"The last time I met you you were hard at work in New York."

"Break