seemed to them to be touched by romance, came at a moment when both
were pathetically receptive. They arranged to meet again, they met
again, and one fine afternoon while Joan was at a theater with
Alice, he spoke and she listened. It was in the more than usually
hotel-like drawing-room of their mutual hotel. People were having
tea, and the band was playing. There was a jangle of voices, the
jingle of a musical comedy, the movement of waiters. Under the
leaves of a tame palm which once had known the gorgeous freedom of a
semi-tropical forest he stumbled over a proposal, the honest,
fearful, pulsating proposal of a man who conceived that he was
trying hopelessly to hitch his wagon to a star, and she, tremulous,
amazed, and on the verge of tears, accepted him. Hers presumably the
dreadful ordeal of facing an incredulous daughter and two sarcastic
parents-in-law and his of standing for judgment before them,--
argument, discussion, satire, irony, abuse even,--a quiet and
determined marriage and a new and beautiful life.

"What a delightful room," said Mrs. Harley. "It looks so comfortable
for a drawing-room that it must have been furnished by a man."

"We'll have a house in town by October, around here, and I'll bet it
won't be uncomfortable when you've finished with it."

The raucous shouts of men crying an "extra" took Harley quickly to
the open window. He watched one scare-monger edge his way up one
side of the street and another, whose voice was like the jagged edge
of a rusty saw, bandy leg his way up the other side. "Sounds like
big sea battle," he said, after listening carefully. "Six German
warships sunk, five British. Horrible loss of life. But I may be
wrong. These men do their best not to be quite understood. Only six