ne can understand--and those clever
plays, you know, that every one goes to see."

"Does he really? Fancy! Can you point me out the man who wrote, 'Oh the
Little Crimson Pansies' and 'The Garden of Alice'? I love his work. It's
so weird. F. J. Rivers, you know."

"My dear Miss Winter, what a dreadful thing! I'm afraid you'll be very
disappointed. As a matter of fact, I am F. J. Rivers myself. Isn't it a
pity? I'm so sorry. And I'm afraid I am not weird. Do forgive me. I'd be
weird in a minute if I could. You know that, I'm sure. Don't you?"

"Fancy! Just fancy!" She blushed crimson. "I was being so natural. I had
no idea I was talking to a clever person."

"No wonder!"

"You see, I'm interested in things. I particularly love the intellectual
atmosphere of this house, and I read all the serious magazines and
things, the _Bookman_ and the _Saturday Review_ and the _Sketch_; and so
on."

"Should you say the atmosphere was really so intellectual here?" said
Rivers a little doubtfully.

The Viennese Band was playing _Caresses_ in its most Viennese way;
people were gaily coming up from supper or coquettishly going down, or
sitting in corners _a deux_, dreamily. The heavy scent of red rosebuds
hung over all. So becoming was the background at this particular moment
that nearly every woman looked fair and every man brave....

"I'm afraid--I mean, I suppose--you take what they call an intelligent
interest in the subjects of the day, Miss Winter?"

"I should think so, indeed!" she answered.

"Oh dear!" Rivers looked depressed as he tried to remember what he knew
about Radium and Russia.

"Somehow I don't feel frightened of _you_," she said. "Will you take me
to have a cup of tea?"

He escorted her downstairs, endeavouring to make up for any
disappointment she might feel by pointing out with reckless lavishness
Mr. Chamberlain, Beerbohm Tree, Arthur Balfour, Madame Melba, Filsen
Young, George Alexander, and Winston Churchill, none of whom, by a
curious coincidence, happened to be present.

"Surely I may talk to you a moment," Woodville murmured to Sylvia.
"Every one's happy eating, and you needn't bother. Just come out, one
second--on the verandah through the little room. After all, I'm a friend
of the family!"

"Why, so you are!"

She fluttered out with him through the French window of the little
conversation room to a part of the garden that had been boarded and
enclosed, forming with its striped awning and Ja