answer to
his letter.

Wide open and illumined, lay John Ballard's old Bible. And across the
pages, fresh and fragrant as the friendship which she had given him,
was the late rose which Mary had picked in the garden.

CHAPTER XII

_In Which Mary and Roger Have Their Hour; and in Which a Tea-Drinking
Ends in What Might Have Been a Tragedy._

To Mary, possessed and swayed by the letter which she had received from
Roger, it seemed a strange thing that the rest of the world moved
calmly and unconsciously forward.

The letter had come to her on Saturday. On Sunday morning everybody
went to church. Everybody dined afterward, unfashionably, at two
o'clock, and later everybody motored out to the Park.

That is, everybody but Mary!

She declined on the ground of other things to do.

"There'll be five of you anyhow with Aunt Frances and Grace," she said,
"and I'll have tea for you when you come back."

So Constance and Gordon and Aunt Isabelle had gone off, and with Barry
at Leila's, Mary was at last alone.

Alone in the house with Roger Poole!

Her little plans were all made, and she went to work at once to execute
them.

It was a dull afternoon, and the old-fashioned drawing-room, with its
dying fire, and pale carpet, its worn stuffed furniture and pallid
mirrors looked dreary.

Mary had Susan Jenks replenish the fire. Then she drew up to it one of
the deep stuffed chairs and a lighter one of mahogany, which matched
the low tea-table which was at the left of the fireplace. She set a
tapestry screen so that it cut off this corner from the rest of the
room and from the door.

Gordon had brought, the night before, a great box of flowers, and there
were valley lilies among them. Mary put the lilies on the table in a
jar of gray-green pottery. Then she went up-stairs and changed the
street costume which she had worn to church for her old green velvet
gown. When she came down, the fire was snapping, and the fragrance of
the lilies made sweet the screened space--Susan had placed on the
little table a red lacquered tray, and an old silver kettle.

Susan had also delivered the note which Mary had given her to the Tower
Rooms.

Until Roger came down Mary readjusted and rearranged everything. She
felt like a little girl who plays at keeping house. Some new sense
seemed waked within her, a sense which made her alive to the coziness
and comfort and seclusion of this cut-off corner. She found herself