ke to her widowed
sister on Long Island--Mrs. Severance is so good at finding uses for all
sorts of odd things--Elizabeth felt quite sure she would find some use
or other for these too.

Ted Billett certainly found a good deal of use for some of it, thought
Mrs. Severance whimsically. It had hardly been a Paolo and Francesca
_diner-a-deux_--both had been much too frankly hungry when they came to
it and Ted's most romantic remarks so far had been devoted to a vivid
appreciation of Mrs. Severance's housekeeping. But all men are very much
like hungry little boys every so often, Mrs. Severance reflected.

Ted really began to wonder around nine-thirty. At first there had been
only coming in and finding Rose just through setting the table and then
they had been too busy with dinner and their usual fence of talk to
allow for any unfortunate calculations as to how Mrs. Severance could
do it on her salary. But what a perfect little apartment--and even
supposing all the furniture and so forth were family inheritances, and
they fitted each other much too smoothly for that, the mere upkeep of
the place must run a good deal beyond any "Mode" salary. Mr. Severance?
Ted wasn't sure. Oh, well he was too comfortable at the moment to look
gift horses of any description too sternly in the mouth.

Rose _was_ beautiful--it was Ted and Rose by now. He would like to see
someone paint her sometime as Summer, drowsy and golden, passing through
fields of August, holding close to her rich warm body the tall sheaves
of her fruitful corn. And again the firelight crept close to him, and
under its touch all his senses stirred like leaves in light wind, glad
to be hurt with firelight and then left soothed and heavy and warm.

Only now he had a charm against what the firelight meant--what it had
been meaning more and more these last few weeks with Rose Severance. It
was not a very powerful-looking charm--a dozen lines of a letter from
Elinor Piper asking him to come to Southampton, but it began "Dear Ted"
and ended "Elinor" and he thought it would serve.

That ought to be enough--that small thing only magical from what you
made it mean against what it really was--that wish that nobody could
even nickname hope--to keep you cool against the waves of firelight that
rose over you like the scent of a harvest meadow. It was, almost.

Rose had been telling him how unhappy she was all evening. Not
whiningly--and not, as he remembered later, with any speci