sh to talk. Friends,"
she added--"true friends are most eloquent in their mutual silence.
Ahem!"

Eileen Erroll, standing near on the pitching raft, listened intently,
but curiously enough said nothing either in praise or blame.

"He is exactly the right age," insisted Gladys--as though somebody had
said he was not--"the age when a man is most interesting."

The Minster twins twiddled their legs and looked sentimentally at the
ocean. They were a pair of pink and white little things with china-blue
eyes and the fairest of hair, and they were very impressionable; and
when they thought of Selwyn they looked unutterable things at the
Atlantic Ocean.

One man, often the least suitable, is usually the unanimous choice of
the younger sort where, in the disconcerting summer time, the youthful
congregate in garrulous segregation.

Their choice they expressed frankly and innocently; they admitted
cheerfully that Selwyn was their idol. But that gentleman remained
totally unconscious that he had been set up by them upon the shores of
the summer sea.

In leisure moments he often came down to the bathing-beach at the hour
made fashionable; he conducted himself amiably with dowager and
chaperon, with portly father and nimble brother, with the late
debutantes of the younger set and the younger matrons, individually,
collectively, impartially.

He and Gerald usually challenged the rollers in a sponson canoe when
Gerald was there for the week-end; or, when Lansing came down, the two
took long swims seaward or cruised about in Gerald's dory, clad in their
swimming-suits; and Selwyn's youth became renewed in a manner almost
ridiculous, so that the fine lines which had threatened the corners of
his mouth and eyes disappeared, and the clear sun tan of the tropics,
which had never wholly faded, came back over a smooth skin as clear as a
boy's, though not as smoothly rounded. His hair, too, crisped and grew
lighter under the burning sun, which revealed, at the temples, the
slightest hint of silver. And this deepened the fascination of the
younger sort for the idol they had set up upon the sands of Silverside.

Gladys was still eloquent on the subject, lying flat on the raft where
all were now gathered in a wet row, indulging in sunshine and the two
minutes of gossip which always preceded their return swim to the beach.

"It is partly his hair," she said gravely, "that makes him so
distinguished in his appearance--just that touch of