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of the laws of conventional decency which they argued, lying thus beneath the pillow which was Grace’s by right of law and his oath, crossed his mind. He looked at the pillow, he saw it in imagination dinted by a glorious golden head, and nothing else mattered.

“Whistle, you lucky blighter!” he laughed.

He whistled in the bedroom, he sang in the bathroom. He was gloriously uplifted, gloriously happy.

Patricia’s frocks hanging in the wardrobe, and her portmanteau and cabin trunk beneath the bed, occasioned him no further surprise. He would have been surprised had they not been there. They were where they should be.

“What a girl!” he apostrophised his reflection in the mirror. “No foolish nonsense about her. As great in courage as beauty, God bless her! James, you don’t deserve her! No man could deserve her! And if you dare to ask me if I am the first, James, I’ll break your neck!”

****

Patricia, sliding the chops and tomatoes into a dish, heard Harley singing in the bathroom. She shook her head rather sadly and smiled a one-sided, pitying smile.

The evening paper, still in its wrapper as it had been delivered, lay upon the table. Harley had rested his hand upon it and had not noticed it. Patricia gazed at it resentfully, hesitatingly.

Should she take the chance—take the brief happiness? What matter if he saw it now, or in the morning? He could think no worse of her?

She would let chance decide.

She replaced the pan upon the stove, caught up the folded paper, and, going into the breakfast-room, hurled it through the open window. The paper twirled in the air and came to rest in the tecoma hedge which shut out the road. Its whiteness was plainly visible in the dark foliage.

Patricia sighed and closed the window.