lish literature. The most genuine feeling of comradeship sprang up
between the two dissimilar natures, a feeling so strong and so warm
that Sylvia, in addition to her other emotional complications, felt
occasionally a faint pricking of jealousy at seeing her primacy with
her father usurped.

A further factor in her temporary feeling of alienation from him was
the mere physical fact that she saw him much less frequently and that
he had nothing like his usual intimate knowledge of her comings and
goings. And finally, Lawrence, now a too rapidly growing and delicate
lad of eleven, had a series of bronchial colds which kept his mother
much occupied with his care. As far as her family was concerned,
Sylvia was thus left more alone than ever before, and although she had
been trained to too delicate and high a personal pride to attempt the
least concealment of her doings, it was not without relief that she
felt that her parents had but a very superficial knowledge of the
extent and depth to which she was becoming involved in her new
relations. She herself shut her eyes as much as possible to the rate
at which she was progressing towards a destination rapidly becoming
more and more imperiously visible; and consciously intoxicated herself
with the excitements and fatigues of her curiously double life of
intellectual effort in classes and her not very skilful handling of
the shining and very sharp-edged tools of flirtation.

But this ambiguous situation was suddenly clarified by the unexpected
call upon Mrs. Marshall, one day about the middle of December, of no
less a person than Mrs. Jermain Fiske, Sr., wife of the Colonel, and
Jerry's stepmother. Sylvia happened to be in her room when the shining
car drove up the country road before the Marshall house, stopped at
the gate in the osage-orange hedge, and discharged the tall, stooping,
handsomely dressed lady in rich furs, who came with a halting step up
the long path to the front door. Although Sylvia had never seen Mrs.
Fiske, Mrs. Draper's gift for satiric word-painting had made her
familiar with some items of her appearance, and it was with a rapidly
beating heart that she surmised the identity of the distinguished
caller. But although her quick intelligence perceived the probable
significance of the appearance, and although she felt a distinct shock
at the seriousness of having Jerry's stepmother call upon her, she was
diverted from these capital considerations of such vital