ng manias for comfort. Pending the great day he
camped in these rooms, above which, on an upper storey was a duplex
apartment which, if Margaret liked, he proposed to take.

It was for her opinion regarding it that he had asked her to come. In
the forenoon she had telephoned that she and her mother would both be
with him. He had instructed his servant accordingly and now a silver
tea-service that had belonged to his grandmother and which, being
Victorian, was hideous, gleamed at him as he entered the rooms.

Something else gleamed also. On a rug, a puddle of sunlight had spilled.

Above, on the embossed platter, were petits fours, watercress
sandwiches, a sack of sweetmeats, a bunch of violets, a scatter of cups.
Beneath was the puddle.

Lennox looked. It seemed all right.

Harris, his servant, a little man, thin as an umbrella, sidled silently
by. The vestibule took him. From it came the sound of a voice, limpid,
clear, which Lennox knew and knew too was not Margaret's.

"A lady to see you, sir," Harris, reappearing and effacing himself,
announced.

The doorway framed her. There, with her shock of auburn hair, her cameo
face, her slim figure and her costume which, though simple, was not the
ruinous simplicity that Fifth Avenue achieves, Cassy presented a picture
very different from that on the table, a picture otherwise
differentiated by a bundle that was big as a baby.

Lennox did not know but that it might contain a baby and the possibility
alarmed this man who was afraid of nobody.

"Hello!" he exclaimed.

In exclaiming, he stared. He liked the girl. But at the moment she was
in the way. Moreover, why she had come to these rooms of his, where she
had not been invited, and where she had not ventured before, was a
mystery.

"How's your father?" he added.

There are people, as there are animals, that cannot be awkward and are
never ridiculous. Cassy was one of them. None the less she stood on one
foot. The tea-table had become very talkative. It told her that it was
expecting somebody; that watercress sandwiches were not for her; no, nor
Victorian horrors either.

"Be off!" it shouted.

"Sit down," said Lennox.

Cassy, hugging the bundle, remained in the doorway. It was not the
tea-table merely, but something else, the indefinable something which
one may feel and not describe that was telling her to hurry. Afterward,
with that regret which multiplies tears and subtracts nothing, she
wished she had h