ext morning how a chubby little
woman in a bright pink fascinator had clutched her by the arm, and
gasped out: "Carey Penhallow can't take you--he says you're to look out
for someone else," and was gone before she could answer or turn around.

Thus it was that Lucinda, when she came out to the veranda step, found
herself unaccountably deserted. All the Grange Penhallows were gone;
Lucinda realized this after a few moments of bewildered seeking, and
she understood that if she were to get to the Grange that night she must
walk. Plainly there was nobody to take her.

Lucinda was angry. It is not pleasant to find yourself forgotten and
neglected. It is still less pleasant to walk home alone along a country
road, at one o'clock in the morning, wearing a pale green voile. Lucinda
was not prepared for such a walk. She had nothing on her feet save
thin-soled shoes, and her only wraps were a flimsy fascinator and a
short coat.

"What a guy I shall look, stalking home alone in this rig," she thought
crossly.

There was no help for it, unless she confessed her plight to some of the
stranger guests and begged a drive home. Lucinda's pride scorned such
a request and the admission of neglect it involved. No, she would walk,
since that was all there was to it; but she would not go by the main
road to be stared at by all and sundry who might pass her. There was a
short cut by way of a lane across the fields; she knew every inch of it,
although she had not traversed it for years.

She gathered up the green voile as trimly as possible, slipped around
the house in the kindly shadows, picked her way across the side lawn,
and found a gate which opened into a birch-bordered lane where the
frosted trees shone with silvery-golden radiance in the moonlight.
Lucinda flitted down the lane, growing angrier at every step as the
realization of how shamefully she seemed to have been treated came home
to her. She believed that nobody had thought about her at all, which was
tenfold worse than premeditated neglect.

As she came to the gate at the lower end of the lane a man who was
leaning over it started, with a quick intake of his breath, which, in
any other man than Romney Penhallow, or for any other woman than Lucinda
Penhallow, would have been an exclamation of surprise.

Lucinda recognized him with a great deal of annoyance and a little
relief. She would not have to walk home alone. But with Romney
Penhallow! Would he think she had contriv