e the desk, in
a state approaching exhaustion. She was wearing a dark riding-habit
soiled with dust and stained in several places with oil or grease, her
high-laced boots were scratched and sand-covered. But Flavia was beyond
notice of costume and saw only her cousin's sullen misery of expression.

"Dear, you loved him," escaped her, in her double compassion for the
woman whom Gerard had not chosen.

Isabel's gray eyes were crossed by a spark.

"No--I _hate_ him!" she flared viciously. "What did he do it for? He had
no right. He, he----" She pressed her drenched handkerchief hard against
her lips. "Corrie, poor Corrie----"

Flavia shrank, commencing to tremble before a looming premonition of
something still worse to be endured.

"What of Corrie? Isabel, what?"

"You will hear soon enough," she assured bitterly. "I've said all I can.
No--don't ask me, don't follow me. They will tell you downstairs. I'm
going."

Downstairs, meant the servants. Flavia Rose was, above all things,
maiden-proud; as Gerard's fiancee, as Gerard's wife, no cost of pain or
humiliation would have kept her from him. But she was neither. She had
only her own interpretation of his mirthful glances and graceful speech,
only a few yellow roses to hint that he did not regard her as the most
casual of friends. Suppose she had been mistaken, suppose he had meant
only courtesy to a hostess whose youth exacted gallantry?

Isabel had gone. Flavia turned her face to a diminutive mirror lying
among the trifles on her desk. Could she go down to the curious servants
so--pale, quivering and emotion-spent? Even as she looked into her own
reflected eyes, the tears at last overflowed.

It was half an hour later before Flavia, quiet, dignified and only
betrayed by her absolute pallor, trusted herself to descend the stairs.

The Rose house was too near the race course, too intimately concerned in
the drama, for the information she sought not to be already rife gossip
there. When Mr. Rose came home, near noon, he had little left to tell
his daughter except Gerard's condition and his defense of Corrie.

"Then Corrie did not hurt him," she grasped the exquisite relief.

Mr. Rose shook his head, reluctantly discouraged and discouraging. He
had not gone to the city during those intervening hours; he never, then
or afterward, spoke of where he had been or what he had felt.

"There was the wrench," he heavily reminded her. "And where has he sent
Dean, who must