"What the devil did that young cub show up here for just at this time?"

Cosden demanded.

"Didn't you hear?" Monty explained innocently. "He wanted to cheer me up in my 'awful loneliness.'"

"Lonely fiddlesticks!" Cosden protested irritably. "Don't you grasp the fact that his coming is going to mess things up?"

"Why, no," Huntington said slowly, pausing at the door of his room to give his friend opportunity to finish his remarks; "I can't for the life of me see that."

"Don't you see that it's Merry Thatcher the kid is making up to?"

"Oh, ho!" Huntington exclaimed. "So that's the situation! It was stupid of me not to understand."

"Well, that's it; and I won't have it."

"Of course you won't; but how are you going to stop it?"

"That's your job, Monty. It's up to you to send him about his business."

"That doesn't appeal to me as a sporting proposition," Huntington said after a moment's deliberation. "I didn't come down here to help you get a corner in anything, but merely as an observer, and to give you expert advice. Now you suggest a combination--trust, as it were--of two full-grown men against a half-baked boy. It isn't worthy of you, Connie, and I'm not sure that it isn't an illegal restraint of trade. Oh, no; I couldn't think of it."

"I'd like to see you in the same situation just once," growled Cosden.

"Why the devil can't you send the boy home?"

"If I did, he'd come back so quick he'd meet himself going away,"

Huntington said gravely; "but as a matter of fact I understand that he plans to go on Monday, and there's no boat sailing before then anyhow."

He opened the door of his room and stepped inside.

"I might add, Connie," he continued, "that if you're afraid to take chances with a boy like that I don't feel much confidence in the final outcome of your benedictine expedition."

"I'm serious in this," Cosden snapped back. "My b.u.mp of humor evidently got light-struck in the developing. Billy has twenty years ahead of him to pick out a girl while I haven't, and he must understand that I mean business."

"Of course he must," agreed Huntington. "It hadn't occurred to me until you spoke of it that there was the remotest chance of having Billy show sense enough to become interested in any girl so well calculated to make a man of him. In fact, I doubt very much whether his own intellect has carried him so far. It's all right for you or me to contemplate committing matrimony, but a young man, in these days of increasing cost of everything, is likely to become a grandfather before he can afford to be a father. Only the other day, Connie, the thought came to me that if this high cost of living continues it will make death a necessity of life."

"You are evidently in no frame of mind to discuss anything serious now,"

Cosden retorted; "I'll wait until after dinner."

"Do!" Huntington's face brightened. "Look at the reproachful expression on the bosom of that beautiful white shirt which Dixon has laid out for me. Can't you almost hear the pathos in its tone as it asks to be filled?"

The door slammed, and Cosden's heavy tread could be heard as he disgustedly retreated down the hall to his own room.

One of the compensations of maturity is that the adjustment of proper proportions comes more quickly than to youth. It may be that Cosden saw the modic.u.m of truth which lay beneath his friend's bantering; it may be that he was ashamed to have shown any uncertainty in his mind as to the final outcome of his emba.s.sy. At all events, he seemed to be in the best of humor when he dined with Huntington and the boy, and even accepted with good grace the unexpected announcement that Billy and Merry were to "take in" the dance at the "Hamilton." It may be that he was determined to demonstrate his strength of mind, for when the little party rea.s.sembled on the piazza, and the young people disappeared soon after the coffee, he devoted himself to Edith Stevens with an a.s.siduity which caused Huntington to smile quietly to himself. Stevens and Thatcher, finding the ladies well provided for, went down-stairs for a game of billiards. Mrs. Thatcher cheerfully accepted Huntington's invitation to stroll to the pier, leaving Miss Stevens and Cosden by themselves.

"I've made an appointment for you on Monday morning," Thatcher remarked to Cosden as he pa.s.sed by.

"Good! I'll keep it," was the prompt response.

"What do you think of Marian's resurrection?" Edith asked him when they were alone.

Cosden looked in the direction of the pier. "Do you mean--" he began.

"Oh, no!" she interrupted him. "That is merely a revival, which I imagine may develop into an experience meeting. I mean Mr. Hamlen. Think of a devotion that forces a man to bury himself for twenty years! I could throw myself on his neck for restoring my lost belief in the constancy of man."

"I hadn't heard that side of the story," Cosden observed.

"It was while we were at school together," Edith explained. "Marian was irresistible then--as now, and every man she met lost his head altogether; but for a time she and Mr. Hamlen were engaged. Then she married the last man we expected; but she and Harry have been very happy. It simply shows that you never can tell."

"Did you know Hamlen then?"

"No; but I heard enough about him. If he had been merely intelligent instead of intellectual he might have had her just as well as not. He simply frightened her out of it."

"Where did Monty come in?"

"I never heard of him; things couldn't have gone very far."

"You remember what he said just before we started out this morning? I know him pretty well and Monty doesn't speak like that unless there is something back of it."

"Well," Edith laughed, "I'm sure I should have known, even so. Why, I could reel off so many names that you would think Marian was a heartless coquette; but it wasn't that at all. She simply loved attention, as all women do."

"How about the daughter?" queried Cosden.

"Merry?" Miss Stevens interrogated. "Oh, Merry is an up-to-date, twentieth-century thoroughbred. Marian has never known just what to make of her because she isn't like other girls, but to my mind the comparison is all to her credit. I'm generous when I give the child so good a character, for I know she heartily disapproves of me."

Cosden was pleased with the intuition he had shown in his selection. "I should think young Huntington would bore her about as much as a youngster in kilts," he said, to draw her out.

"He is her brother's friend, she adores athletics and dancing, and she is exercising the prerogative of her age and s.e.x."

There was a silence of several moments, during which time Cosden was debating with himself whether it was too late for him to bring his dancing of the vintage of the nineties up to the present confusion of innovations. He had scoffed at modern dances but it might become necessary to revise his views.

"What an unusual ring you have," Miss Stevens exclaimed, leaning over his hand which rested upon the arm of his chair. "Is there a romance connected with it?"

Cosden took it off and handed it to her. "No," he said. "When you know me better you will understand that romance doesn't come into my make-up.

I bought that ring myself particularly to avoid any sentiment. I can take it off when I like, wear it or not as I choose, and if I lose it n.o.body's heart is broken."

"That is an original idea," she laughed; then her face sobered. "I used to think romance was everything," she said seriously. "Now I wonder if what we call romance isn't another word for illusion. As I look back at my girl friends and see how many romances became tragedies, and how many matter-of-fact marriages, like Marian's and Harry's, have developed into real unions, I'm inclined to think that romance is a form of hypnotism."

"You've expressed my idea to a dot," Cosden replied emphatically.

"Huntington is a sentimentalist, and he stamps my common-sense ideas as evidences of a commercial instinct. I've seen just what you've seen, and I believe that the business of life rests on exactly the same basis as the business of trade."

"Take Harry Thatcher, for example," Edith continued her own conversation rather than replied to his; "there's nothing brilliant about him outside his business success, but you always know where to find him. He's a comfortable man to have around. With men, they say he dominates everything he goes into, but in his home,--well, every now and then he stands out just on principle, but as a matter of fact even his ideas are in his wife's name."

Mrs. Thatcher and Huntington approached them returning from their moon-bath on the steps of the pier.

"Did you ever see so wonderful a night, Edith?" she exclaimed with enthusiasm. "This atmosphere, and the renewing of my friendship with Mr.

Huntington, make me feel like a girl again."

"Monty must have been composing poetry," Cosden remarked.