wes it to one's partner, you
know, not to reveal entirely the weakness of the hand that's just been
dealt. You should smile--at least a little!"

Barbara, brain already hopelessly entangled, wheeled in astonishment at
the almost viciously satirical suggestion, refusing even while her face
flamed to believe that she had caught correctly the impossibly cynical,
unbelievably unkind insinuation of this girl who was her closest
friend. But Miriam's eyes silenced the demand for an explanation,
which had risen with an hitherto unknown coldness to her lips. Instead
Barbara reached out impetuously and took the girl's icy wrist in both
her own hands.

"Miriam, child, what is it?" she breathed. "What is the matter, dear?
You're ill--you're cold as death!"

And at that the lash of scornful intolerance for all things
hypocritical, the flick of which Barbara had never known before, was
gone from Miriam's tongue. She moistened her lips and tried to speak,
and had to try again before her voice would come.

"Have you--seen Garry?" she asked huskily. "Do you know where he went?"

The hopelessness of the query made possible but one interpretation of
all that lay behind it, and yet Barbara, who had not so much as guessed
at it until now, refused the thought as too fantastic for credence.
Again a wave of conscious color stained her face.

"Do you mean since--since----" Her lips refused to phrase it, but
Miriam finished it for her.

"Since he went swinging out into the dark on Ragtime." She, too,
strained at the sentence, but for an entirely different reason. "I was
looking for him, but I was too late. Bobs, all evening his eyes have
been mad--his mood insane! I heard just his last word or two to you
and--Mr. O'Mara, out there on the lawn. His father, you know--but you
don't think. . . . Barbara, I'm frightened--I'm so terribly
frightened!"

It ended in a little moan of fear. And now, astounded past all belief,
Barbara understood. But before she could speak the seeming need of
woman reassurance, no matter how illogical, was gone. Amazingly, all
in an instant, the living dread disappeared from Miriam's face; she
stiffened and threw back her head with that short laugh which contained
so little of mirth, so much that was hard to translate. And the
Honorable Archibald Wickersham, appearing the same instant at Barbara's
elbow, frowned at its note of derision.

"I've just been warning Barbara," the tall girl was already