beauty and identifying him with the Pope fortune, had paid him
small attention. She had been absorbed then in the wretched
conclusion of the Foster affair. Derrick Foster had been
distressing and annoying her unmercifully. After the warm and
delightful friendship of several months, after luncheons and teas,
opera and concerts in the greatest harmony, Derrick Foster had had
the daring, the impudence, to imply--to insinuate--

Well, Isabelle had gotten rid of him, although she could not yet
think of him without scarlet colour in her cheeks. And it had been
on a particularly trying afternoon, when the unshed tears of anger
and hurt pride had been making her fine eyes heavier and more
mysterious than usual, that this nice boy, this handsome friend of
Ward, had gone riding with her, and had shown such charming
sympathy for her dark mood. They had had tea at the Country Club,
and Tony, as she had begun at once to call him, had been
wonderfully amusing and soothing. Isabelle, when they came back to
the house, had turned impulsively in the hall, had laid her small
hand, in its dashing gauntlet, upon his big shoulder.

"You've carried me over an ugly bog, Little Boy!" she had said. "I
like you--such a lot!"

That was six weeks ago, but in those short six weeks the little
boy that she had patronized had entirely upset her preconceived
ideas of him. He was young, and he was absurd, but he did not know
it, and Isabelle began to feel the difficulty of keeping the whole
world from discovering it before he did. He made no secret of his
passion. He came straight to her in any company; he never looked
at anybody else. The young girls to whom she introduced him bored