. I suppose you know Elinor is to be
married to Brookes Ormsby?" Mrs. Brentwood was quite herself again.

Kent dexterously equivocated.

"I know they have been engaged for some time," he said; but the small
quibble availed him nothing.

"Which one of them was it told you it was broken off?" she inquired.

He smiled in spite of the increasing gravity of the situation.

"You may be sure it was not Miss Elinor."

"Humph!" said Mrs. Brentwood. "She didn't tell me, either. 'Twas Brookes
Ormsby, and he said he wanted to begin all over again, or something of
that sort. He is nothing but a foolish boy, for all his hair is getting
thin."

"He is a very honorable man," said Kent.

"Because he is giving you another chance? I don't mind telling you plainly
that it won't do any good, Mr. Kent."

"Why?" he asked in his turn.

"For several reasons: one is that Elinor will never marry without my
consent; another is that she can't afford to marry a poor man."

Kent rose.

"I am glad to know how you feel about it, Mrs. Brentwood: nevertheless, I
shall ask you to give your consent some day, God willing."

He expected an outburst of some sort, and was telling himself that he had
fairly provoked it, when she cut the ground from beneath his feet.

"Don't you go off with any such foolish notion as that, David Kent," she
said, not unsympathetically. "She's in love with Brookes Ormsby, and she
knows it now, if she didn't before." And it was with this arrow rankling
in him that Kent bowed himself out and went to join the young women on the
porch.

XXII

A BORROWED CONSCIENCE

The conversation on the Brentwood porch was chiefly of Breezeland Inn as a
health and pleasure resort, until an outbound electric car stopped at the
corner below and Loring came up to make a quartet of the trio behind the
vine-covered trellis.

Later, the ex-manager confessed to a desire for music--Penelope's
music--and the twain went in to the sitting-room and the piano, leaving
Elinor and Kent to make the best of each other as the spirit moved them.

It was Elinor's chance for free speech with Kent--the opportunity she had
craved. But now it was come, the simplicity of the thing to be said had
departed and an embarrassing complexity had taken its place. Under other
conditions Kent would have been quick to see her difficulty, and would
have made haste to efface it; but he was fresh from the interview with
Mrs. Brentwood, and the Parthian arr