afterward I shall probably be late. Don't bother about sitting up for
me--I have a key."

"Well, take care of yourself," responded Adams pleasantly, adding to a
young man who appeared in the drawing-room doorway, "How are you, Mr.
Brady? Please don't let Mrs. Adams be so foolish as to stand outside in
the wind. I can't make her take care of her cold."

"Oh, I'll promise to look out for it," replied Brady, standing slightly
behind Connie, and arranging by a careless movement the white fur on her
cloak. His handsome wooden features possessed hardly more character than
was expressed by his immaculately starched shirt front, but he was not
without a certain wholly superficial attraction, half as of a sleek,
well-groomed animal and half as of a masculine conceit, naked and
unashamed.

Connie tinkled out her nervous, high-pitched, vacant little laugh, which
she used to fill in gaps in conversation much as a distinguished
virtuoso might interlude his own important efforts with selections of
light vocal strains.

"Roger is always worrying about my health," she said, "but the truth is
that it's so good I'll never begin to value it until it's gone." Her
excited, fluttering manner blew about her almost with a commotion of the
atmosphere, and reminded Adams at times of a tempestuous March breeze
shaking a fragile wind flower. It was unnatural, overdone, unbecoming,
but it seemed at last to have got quite beyond her control, and the
pretty girlish composure he remembered as one of her freshest charms,
was lost in her general violence of animation. Of late he knew that she
had fought off her natural exhaustion by the frequent use of stimulants,