le. It was not on her cards to marry Graham and to try
to live on his salary.

So for a few weeks the engagement was concealed even from Mrs.
Hayden, and Graham, who had received some stock from his father on
his twenty-first birthday, secretly sold a few shares and bought the
engagement ring. With that Marion breather easier. It was absolute
evidence.

Her methods were the methods of her kind and her time. To allure a man
by every wile she knew, and having won him to keep him uncertain and
uneasy, was her perfectly simple creed. So she reduced love to its
cheapest terms, passion and jealousy, played on them both, and made
Graham alternately happy and wretched.

Once he found Rodney Page there, lounging about with the manner of a
habitue. It seemed to Graham that he was always stumbling over Rodney
those days, either at home, with drawings and color sketches spread out
before him, or at the Hayden house.

"What's he hanging around here for?" he demanded when Rodney, having
bent over Marion's hand and kissed it, had gone away. "If he could see
that bare spot on the top of his head he'd stop all that kow-towing."

"You're being rather vulgar, aren't you?" Marion had said. "He's a very
old friend and a very dear one."

"Probably in love with you once, like all the rest?"

He had expected denial from her, but she had held her cigaret up in the
air, and reflectively regarded its small gilt tip.

"I'm afraid he's rather unhappy. Poor Rod!"

"About me?"

"About me."

"Look here, Toots," he burst out. "I'm playing square with you. I never
go anywhere but here. I--I'm perfectly straight with you. But every time
here I find some of your old guard hanging round. It makes me wild."

"They've always come here, and as long as our engagement isn't known, I
can't very well stop them."

"Then let me go to father."

"He'll turn you out, you know. I know men, dear old thing, and father is
going to raise a merry little hell about us. He's the sort who wants
to choose his son's wife for him. He'd like to play Providence." She
watched him, smiling, but with slightly narrowed eyes. "I rather think
he has somebody in mind for you now."

"I don't believe it."

"Of course you don't. But he has."

"Who?"

"Delight. She's exactly the sort he thinks you'll need. He still thinks
you are a little boy, Graham, so he picks out a nice little girl for
you. Such a nice little girl."

The amused contempt in her voice made him angr