"She wouldn't LOOK at Joe Pickering! Joe drinks, and Billy's had
enough of that with her father. Besides, he has no money of his
own! He's impossible!"

"Where's the mother all this time?" asked the Englishman. "I mean
to say, she's living, isn't she, and all that?"

"Very much alive," Miss Vanderwall said. "Married to an Italian
count--Countess Luca d' Asafo. His people have cut him off;
they're Catholics. She has two little girls; there's an uncle
who's obliged to leave property to a son, and it serves Paula
quite right, I think. Where they live, or what on, I haven't the
remotest idea. I saw her in a car on Fifth Avenue, not so long
ago, with two heavy little black-haired girls; she looked sixty."

"Her sister, you know, was thick with my niece, Barbara
Olliphant," said Peter Pomeroy. "And funny thing!--when Barbara
was married..."

It was a long story, and fortunately moved away from the previous
topic; so that when it was presently interrupted by the arrival of
two women, everybody in the group had cause to feel gratitude for
a merciful deliverance.

The two women were Rachael and Carol Breckenridge, who came in a
little breathless, the throbbing engine of their motor car still
sounding faintly from the direction of the club doorway. Carol, a
slender, black-eyed, dusky-skinned girl of seventeen, took her
place beside Miss Sartoris on the fender, granting a brief
unsmiling nod to one or two friends, and eying the group between