atter guilty of his
first dinner jacket and enormously proud of his guilt, stood looking at
Barbara while she was chattering at him, without hearing distinctly a
word she spoke. Miss Sarah's question helped to bring him back.

"You look as though I were a wraith," the girl accused him. "Am I so
pale after a few weeks of sophisticated city air?"

But her man had taken command of himself again, by then.

"I thought you looked like--shall I tell you what I thought?"

"Most certainly," she was forced to insist. "Wasn't it a bald enough
invitation for a pretty speech?"

"I thought you looked like a small pink bon-bon," responded Steve
leisurely, and while the rest laughed at her discomfiture, Fat Joe
leaned over and nudged Garry.

"What'd I tell you?" he demanded. "What'd I tell you? Say, ain't he
working well to-night?"

But for once Joe had himself been misled into premature enthusiasm such
as he had decried in Garry. For if Barbara had, in Miss Sarah's
phrase, been thinking of Steve in terms of blue flannels and corduroy,
until then, before the dinner ended she was aware of a difference in
the attitude of this man who loved her, too great to be explained by
the clothes he wore. The very light in his eyes, whenever she
contrived to catch him gazing at her, convinced her of what was behind
his new restraint; and then, immediately, perversely, she set herself
to break it down by those very methods best calculated to strengthen
it. More than once that evening Dexter Allison withdrew from the
general conversation to watch the play of his daughter's glances upon
O'Mara's tanned face; several times he fell to chewing his lip as was
his custom when deeply perplexed. Complications scarcely ever troubled
Dexter Allison. He was beginning to awake to one now which already
worried him more than he cared to admit.

There was no keeping the girl within doors after dinner was over. She
ran upstairs and changed into moccasins and white blanket coat, and
skirt that barely met the moccasin tops half-way. And Steve, who had
changed too and was waiting for her when she came down, had knotted a
crimson scarf about the middle of his belted jacket to match the white
one twisted about her throat. With much approval Miss Sarah noted,
while she watched them away on snow shoes, the bit of color it added to
his soberer garb; she promised herself to recall it to Caleb at some
future date. Caleb had very pronounced views regardin