"That's it!" Bert's face beamed. "It's a way she has. She just puts
it over. Kind of gives you a chilly feeling, you don't know why. Maybe
she's learned to be so quiet about it because of the control she's
learned by passing sleepless nights without squealing out or getting
sour. The chances are she didn't bat an eye all last night--
excitement, you know, the crowd, swimming Mountain Lad and such
things. Now ordinary things that'd keep most women awake, like danger,
or storm at sea, and such things, Dick says don't faze her. She can
sleep like a baby, he says, when the town she's in is being bombarded
or when the ship she's in is trying to claw off a lee shore. She's a
wonder, and no mistake. You ought to play billiards with her--the
English game. She'll go some."

A little later, Graham, along with Bert, encountered the girls in the
morning room, where, despite an hour of rag-time song and dancing and
chatter, he was scarcely for a moment unaware of a loneliness, a lack,
and a desire to see his hostess, in some fresh and unguessed mood and
way, come in upon them through the open door.

Still later, mounted on Altadena and accompanied by Bert on a
thoroughbred mare called Mollie, Graham made a two hours' exploration
of the dairy center of the ranch, and arrived back barely in time to
keep an engagement with Ernestine in the tennis court.

He came to lunch with an eagerness for which his keen appetite could
not entirely account; and he knew definite disappointment when his
hostess did not appear.

"A white night," Dick Forrest surmised for his guest's benefit, and
went into details additional to Bert's of her constitutional