lined. He had money enough and to
spare. He could have made Amy or Ethel very comfortable if he had
married either of them. But he had not wanted to marry. There had been a
time when he had liked to think of Amy as presiding over his table. She
would have fitted in perfectly with the old portraits and old silver and
the family diamonds. Then Ethel had come along. She had not fitted in
with the diamonds and portraits and silver, but she had stirred his
pulses.

"Anywhere else but in Georgetown," old Molly Winchell was saying, "those
girls would have been snapped up long ago. It's a poor matrimonial
market."

Murray was complacently aware that he was geographically the only
eligible man on the Merryman horizon. Unless Amy and Ethel could marry
with distinction they would not marry at all. It was not lack of
attraction which kept them single, but lack of suitors in their own set.

And now here was Anne, with Ethel's loveliness and Amy's look of race.
There was also that look of angelic detachment from the things of earth.

So Murray's eyes rested on Anne with great content as she came and sat
beside Molly Winchell.

Other eyes rested on her--Amy's with quick jealousy. "So now it's Anne,"
she said to herself as she perceived Murray's preoccupation. Five years
ago she had said, "Now it's Ethel," as she had seen him turn to the
fresher beauty. Before that she had dreamed of herself as loving and
beloved. It had been hard to shut her eyes to that vision.

Yet--better Anne than an outsider. Amy had a fierce sense of
proprietorship in Murray. If she gave him to Ethel, to Anne, he would be
still in a sense hers. With Anne or Ethel she would share his future,
partake of his present.

A third pair of eyes surveyed Anne with interest as she sat by Molly.

"Corking kid," said the owner of the eyes to himself.

His name was Maxwell Sears. He was not in the least like Murray Flint.
He was from the Middle West, he was red-blooded, and he cared nothing
for the past. He held it as a rather negligible honor that he had a
Declaration-signing ancestor. The important things to Maxwell were that
he was representing his district in Congress; that he was still young
enough to carry his college ideals into politics, and that he had just
invested a small portion of the fortune which his father had left him in
a model stock farm in Illinois.

For the rest, he was big, broad-shouldered, clean-minded. Now and then
he looked up at the star