you want to do yourself, aren't you?"

"Yes. Quite old enough and quite ready to decide for myself," he answered as he stood aside for her to precede him into the living-room. "Do you play or sing?" he asked as he followed her to the piano. The instrument looked as though it were loved and used. It was her turn to be a trifle scornful.

"I play and sing. Does it seem incredible that I should?" She seated herself and dropped her hands in her lap. "Shall I play for you?"

"Please." He leaned his arms on the piano and looked down at her, but she realized that his thoughts were not following his eyes. "I am not in the least musical, but we had a chap in our company overseas who could make the most shell-shocked instrument give out what seemed to us in the midst of that thundering inferno, heavenly music. Sometimes now a wave of longing for the sound of a piano sweeps over me, played by someone who loves music as that boy loved it. Do you know—Schumann's 'Papillions'? That was one of his favorites."

For answer she played the first bar of the exquisite thing. Once she glanced up. The eyes of the man leaning on the piano, not blue now, but dark with memories, were an ocean removed from her. It was a minute after the last note was struck before they came back to her face. He drew a long breath.

"Thank you," he said simply, but his tone was better than a paean of praise. Then the softness left his eyes. There was aggressiveness and a hint of irony in his voice as he said stiffly:

"My—my father has given me to understand that you will do me the honor to marry me."

A passion of anger shook the girl. She valiantly forced back the tears which threatened, rose and faced him defiantly. Her slender fingers smoothed out the long plumes of her fan. There should be no subterfuge now, she determined, no cause for recrimination later.

"Your father, doubtless, has told you also that my father is willing to buy your name and social position for me with a portion of his fortune. A sort of fifty-fifty arrangement, isn't it?" she added flippantly, with the faintest flicker of her bronze-tipped lashes. Courtlandt shrugged.

"If you wish to put it so crudely."

She took a step back and clenched her hands behind her. Her beautiful eyes were brilliant with scorn, her heart pounded. It seemed as though it must visibly shake her slender body as she answered:

"Why not? If we speak the truth now it may save complications later. You know that my father wants me to marry you and—and why. I frankly confess that I sympathize with his ambitions. I want the best of life in my associations. Your father is in difficulties of one sort—my father is in difficulties of another sort—if a lack of family background can be called a difficulty—and it appears that with our help they can accommodate one another. I'd do anything for Dad—he has done so much for me." She set her teeth sharply in her under lip to steady it.

"Then—then you are not afraid to marry without love?" His eyes were inscrutable.

"Without love? For the man I marry? No, not as long as I have no love for any other. I might love a man when I married him, and then—love comes unbidden, oftentimes unwanted and pouf!—it goes the way it came, and no one can stop it. You know that yourself."

"Not if it is real love, the love of a man for the one woman," he defended.

"Is there such a thing? I wonder?" skeptically.

If he felt a temptation to retaliate he resisted it.

"Then I may conclude that you accept me?" he prompted with frigid courtesy.

"Yes, that is——" a nervous sob caught at her voice. "If—if you will agree to my conditions. Dad has promised me an income of a hundred thousand a year. I will keep half of it in my possession, the other half you are to have to use as you please."

Courtlandt's eyes were black with anger, his knuckles white. He was rough, direct, relentless as he answered:

"You are indeed determined to make this a business affair. But understand now that I won't touch one cent of your cursed money. Whatever arrangement your father wants to make with you and my father is his affair and yours, but you are to leave me out of it absolutely. That's my condition. Do you get it?"

"Yes, I get it." She colored richly, angrily, then paled. Even her lips went white. "There is one thing more. I—we—this marriage is really a bargain—money for social position. Let it be only that. Need there be anything else? You must understand me—you must," in passionate appeal. She laid her hand on his arm. He looked down at her with disconcerting steadiness. His face was stern.

"Yes, I understand. You mean a marriage stripped to its skeleton of legal terms. No mutual responsibilities, no mutual sacrifices, no—no love. That is for you to decide. The Courtlandt debt is far too great for me not to accept any terms you may dictate. It shall be as you wish, I—promise."

Her brown eyes were brilliant with unshed tears as she held out an impulsive hand.

"Thank you. You make the arrangements seem bleak and sordid, but you have given me back my self-respect. Now I feel that it is an honorable bargain between us two. You are to be perfectly free to come and go as you like, and I shall be free, too—but there is one thing I promise you, I—I shall never harm the name I take."

He looked down at the hand he held for an instant then released it.

"I knew that when you came into the room to-night. Will you marry me soon?"

"Whenever you like. Will you—say good-night to your father for me? I——" With a valiant effort to steady her lips, she smiled faintly, opened the door of her room and closed it quickly behind her.

Peter Courtlandt was the first to break the silence as father and son motored home. He made an effort to speak lightly.

"Well, my boy, your close-up was wrong. Geraldine Glamorgan has neither prominent teeth, nor little eyes, nor a kittenish manner; in fact, I don't know when I have seen so beautiful a girl so singularly free from the barnacles of vanity and self-consciousness."

"Kittenish!" his son repeated curtly. "She's far from kittenish. She's an iceberg, and what's more she has the business instinct developed to the nth degree. Believe me, she's a born trader."

CHAPTER III

Geraldine Courtlandt slowed down her car to enter the river road. The sun was setting in a blaze of crimson glory, a few belated birds winged swiftly into the west. Lights on the opposite shore flickered for a moment as they flashed into being, then shone with steady brilliancy. Lights appeared on the few boats swinging at anchor in the quiet water. Lights in house windows beaconed a steady welcome to home-comers. What individuality there was in lights the girl thought. Those across the river seemed entirely municipal and commercial, those on the boats carried a silent warning, those in the windows seemed warmly human.

The turmoil in Jerry's heart subsided. She had driven miles that afternoon through the cold, exhilarating rush of December air, trying to forget Steve's tone when he had refused her offer to drive him to town that morning. Had she been married only a month? It seemed as though centuries had passed since she and Steve had stood before the altar with their few witnesses and exchanged marriage vows. She shivered. If she had realized how irrevocable they were, their solemn admonition, would she have had the courage to marry to please her father, she wondered.

"And forsaking all others keep thee only unto him as long as ye both shall live?" The question had echoed in every sound at the wedding breakfast in her father's apartment; she had read it deep in Peggy's eyes as they had met hers from across the room; it had kept time to the revolution of the wheels as she and Steve had motored out to the Manor in the late afternoon. Her lips twisted in a bitter little smile as she remembered Sir Peter's tactful suppression of surprise