stoons of Chinese lanterns.
At the carriage-entrance smart automobiles were coming and going, and
one of them, with the dust of the Boston parkways on its running-gear,
brought the guests of honor--three daughters of a Western senator lately
home from their summer abroad.
Blount knew neither the honorers nor the honored ones, and had
resolutely refused the chance offered him by Mrs. Beverley to amend his
ignorance. For Patricia's "No" was not yet twenty-four hours old, and
since it had changed the stars in their courses for Patricia's lover,
the cataclysm was much too recent to postulate anything like a return of
the heavenly bodies to their normal orbits.
Not that Blount put it that way, either to Mrs. Beverley or to himself.
He was a level-eyed, square-shouldered young man of an up-to-date world,
and the stock from which he sprang was prosaic and practical rather than
poetic or sentimental. But the fact remained,-
and when he sat back in
his corner absently folding the lately received telegram into a narrow
spill and scowling moodily down upon the coming and going procession of
motor-cars he was unconsciously giving a very life-like imitation of the
disappointed lover the world over.
It was thus, and apparently by the merest chance, that Gantry found him;
a chance because the Winnebasset club-house is spacious and the dinner
dance minimized the hazards of a meeting between two unattached men who
were merely transient guests. But the railroad man at least was
unfeignedly glad.
"Doesn't it beat the dickens what a little world this is?" he exclaimed,
with a true bromidian disregard for the outworn and the axiomatic. "Of
course, I knew you were in or around Boston somewhere, but to run slap
up against you here, when there seemed to be nothing in it for me but to
be bored stiff--" He stopped short, finding it difficult to be shi-