way at the garden party; any one could see it."

Delilah laughed. "His eyes aren't for me. With him it is Mary
Ballard. If I were in love with him, I should hate Mary. But I don't;
I love her. And she's in love with Roger Poole."

Colin looked up from the samples from which he and Delilah were
choosing her spring wardrobe.

"Poole? I knew his wife," he said abruptly; "it was her picture that I
showed you the other night--the little saint in the Fra Angelico
pose--it didn't come to me until afterward that he might be the same
Poole of whom I had heard you speak."

Delilah swept across the room, and turned the canvas outward. "Roger
Poole's wife," she said, "of all things!" Then she stood staring
silently.

"You didn't tell us who she was."

"No," he was weighing mentally Porter's attitude in the matter, "no one
knew but Bigelow."

"And he showed this to Mary?" They looked at each other, and laughed.
"Perhaps all's fair in love," Delilah murmured, at last, "but I
wouldn't have believed it of him."

As she turned the picture toward the wall, Delilah decided, "Mary
Ballard is worth a hundred of such women as this."

"A woman like you is worth a hundred of them," Colin stated
deliberately.

Delilah flushed faintly. Colin Quale was giving to her something which
no other man had given. And she liked it.

"Do you know what you are doing to me?" she said, as she sat down by
the window. "You are making me think that I am like the pictures you
paint of me."

"You are," was the quiet response; "it's just a matter of getting
beneath the surface."

There was a pause during which his fingers and eyes were busy with the
shining samples--then Delilah said: "If Leila and her father go to
Germany in May, I'm going to get Dad to go too. I don't suppose you'd
care to join us? You'll want to get back to that girl in Amesbury or
Newburyport, or whatever it is."

"What girl?"

"The one you are going to marry."

"There is no girl," said Colin quietly, "in Amesbury or Newburyport;
there never has been and there never will be." Coming close, he held
against her cheek a sample of soft pale yellow. "Leila Dick wears that
a lot, but it's not for you." He stood back and gazed at her
meditatively.

"Colin," she protested, "when you look at me that way, I feel like a
wooden model."

He smiled, "That's what you have come to mean to me," he said; "I don't
want to think of you as a woman."

"Why not?" asked dar