had a visitor?" he commented, noticing a half-empty cup beside her
own.

"Only Mr. Flamel," she said, indifferently.

"Flamel? Again?"

She answered without show of surprise. "He left just now. His
yacht is down at Laurel Bay and he borrowed a trap of the Dreshams
to drive over here."

Glennard made no comment, and she went on, leaning her head back
against the cushions of her bamboo-seat, "He wants us to go for a
sail with him next Sunday."

Glennard meditatively stirred his tea. He was trying to think of
the most natural and unartificial thing to say, and his voice
seemed to come from the outside, as though he were speaking behind
a marionette. "Do you want to?"

"Just as you please," she said, compliantly. No affectation of
indifference could have been as baffling as her compliance.
Glennard, of late, was beginning to feel that the surface which, a
year ago, he had taken for a sheet of clear glass, might, after
all, be a mirror reflecting merely his own conception of what lay
behind it.

"Do you like Flamel?" he suddenly asked; to which, still engaged
with her tea, she returned the feminine answer--"I thought you
did."