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lows, "that makes it satisfactory all around. Goodnight, dear."

"Goodnight, mother. I'm darn glad."

Yvonne's visit had another outcome, less proximate but not less vital.

During the course of the afternoon Mrs. Hamill had conducted her upstairs "to see Jock's den, you'll love it, he planned it himself." They had stood shoulder to shoulder on the sill, looking in. . . . A small, bright room, a happy room, walled in on two sides by books, row on row, from floor to ceiling, on a third side by long casement windows with dull purple hangings, on the fourth side by a giant fireplace built of rough field stone. A desk in the center, and, before the fireplace, two chairs of inviting depth, with a reading lamp craning its neck above one of them, and a banjo leaning up against the back of the other . . .

Yvonne had moved to the chair and picked up the banjo, eyeing thoughtfully the nicknames and monograms and bon mots etched on its head. "I didn't know he played."

And Mrs. Hamill had responded, smiling, "I only wish he did everything half so well!"

Then Yvonne had taken the banjo downstairs and thrust it at Jock, and he had played it—oh, remarkably well! Exceedingly well! As Bones Allen was wont to say and would have said again had he been present, "Hot dog, like no one can!" And Yvonne had listened, pondering.

A few days after that she stipulated that he was