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"Yes, I believe I do know, though certainly not about a book. I am sure I know what fever of impatience means." But she was so absorbed in her own troubles that she did not notice this indirect acknowledgment of mine.

"I had imagined that I could get my mind into a state of at least comparative tranquillity down here," she kept on. We were out in our favorite lair, a screened-off grassy spot in the side yard, where a double row of althea bushes furnishes a sense of security against intrusion, yet we were close enough to Waterloo to hear him every time he bumped his head or skinned his knee.

"This place is almost unearthly in its quiet beauty," she said after a moment, looking up through the green vista toward the house. The passion flowers were clambering up on the garden fence and running riot over the yellowing cornstalks. Back of the kitchen the well-house lay asleep in the sun, the star-like blossoms of white clematis which covered the roof of the old building were still untouched by that feathery change which forecasts their coming blight.

"It is beautiful—and it certainly is quiet," I coincided with her emphatically.

"Sometimes at home when the telephone bell and the door-bell and the club meetings and the butcher boys and the laundry men have all made a throbbing pain come in my head I steal away up-stairs to my little den where I lock the door and lie down to try to ease that nervous pain. Then I close my eyes and try to project my astral body down here into all this still, summer loveliness. I come up the gravel walk and on to the front porch—oh, those cedar porches! And I go through the shady hall to the back gallery where I find myself face to face with a great cold watermelon that has just been cut."

"And the library is full of roses, and there is a tray of fragrant peaches that Dilsey gathered early in the morning."

"Ah! I see that you feel its beauty just as much as if it were not an every-day affair to you," she said, looking at me with another one of those searching glances which she has treated me to several times lately. "No wonder you have grown to look like the place."

"To look like it!" I encouraged her to go on, for a compliment is more food for my soul than all the white hyacinths in a florist's window.

"Surely you look like it," she continued. "You are as patrician looking as the house—and as vivid as the flowers in the yard."

"Dear me!" I exclaimed. "Then I am good-looking?"

"Ann, don't be an idiot! If Aunt Mary had longed for a child as white as snow and as red as blood and as black as the ebony of her embroidery frame, she couldn't have produced anything more exotic than you."

There was a moment of silence in which I thought of the vivid beauty of Lady Caroline Lamb. Of course I am not anything to compare with her! Of course not! But how these vivid beauties care—for some one—when the time comes! Yes; when the time comes. But, dear me, it seems that it is never coming!

"Well, what good does it all do me?" I demanded at length, the long-pent-up storm of restlessness thundering to make itself heard. "Granted that I look as well as you say, and that I live in an earthly paradise—can't you see that there is no—that it is lonesome?"

"You are bored?" she asked sympathetically.

"Bored! I am stifling!"

"Yet the summer here is a joy—with oceans of morning-glories and miles of horseback riding!"

"It is a joy, I admit, and a thousand times better than being a summer girl at a noisy watering-place."

"What is a summer girl?" she asked with a smile, but I was not smiling. I was pessimistic.

"A sleepy-headed female with trunks full of soiled clothes! That's what I always am when I get back from a trip."

"Of course the winters here are dull." She had picked up her tablet and was writing her initials over and over again on the back.

"They are. Dull gray," I agreed. "The days are a weary succession of that uninteresting color; but, dreary as they are, you want them to last. When the daylight is fading and night coming on, but while it is still too early to light the lamps—then is the worst time of all! There is no sound on earth save a few lonely little calf bleats from down in the lot, until the woodchop echoes begin—and they are lonelier still."

"It's awful, I know!"

"Do you know what I do on such nights as this? I get out my opera-glasses and long gloves and a lace handkerchief, and lay them on my table as if I were about to dress for a beautiful opera. Then I read Aux Italiens; think a while—and go to bed."

"Poor child!"

"I used never to feel this way," I kept on. "Always—until lately—I have loved winter. It has meant only great roaring fires and barrels of apples. Even the absorbing books which used always to accompany the apples and big fires are not absorbing any more."

"Of course not. A girl with as much go in her as you have needs to lose herself entirely in something."

"And that something will never be bound in three-quarters morocco," I replied, flinging away my book impatiently.

"No, indeed! The bookworm has turned. The 'something' will be bound in an English tweed suit of clothes through the day's business hours, and—"

"And a long gray overcoat, and a soft gray hat."

She looked at me in surprise.

"Then you've seen him?"

"I have seen—the type."

She understood, but she still looked at me wonderingly.

"Alfred?" she ventured.

"No. He is my friend, but if I were in love with Alfred I'd have palpitations every time I passed the red cross on an ambulance. That's the way I'm going to love."

"I should think you could find an outlet for all the pent-up ambition you complain of, if you loved Alfred," she insisted, although she imagined that she was not insisting. "I have never met a more ambitious man, nor one of such singleness of purpose. Naturally success seems to gravitate toward him, as the crow flies."

"And still it seems such a short while ago that Doctor Gordon took a liking to him, when he was a raw medical student," I said thoughtfully, my mind going back to the day I first saw Alfred Morgan, big, broad and bronzed, with his hair too long and his sleeves too short. There have been many days since then; days of a delightful comradeship when I was in the city. I would look after him with sisterly authority, bidding him wear his rubbers on rainy mornings, or give me his gloves to mend whenever I happened to be spending the day at the Gordons' and we sat down for a quiet chat after luncheon. Ann Lisbeth and Doctor Gordon still live so close to the Claybornes that we are like one big family when I am with them. Alfred soon began to tell me that I was his best friend, but he never called me the "guiding star of his existence." He tried to teach me the bones of the face, instead, and explained the barbarism of corsets.

When he was out in practice the first year, but still lived with the Gordons, because Doctor Gordon would not let him go, I used to drive around with him to see his patients, sitting out in the runabout, which he had bought at half-price because it was a last year's model, and reading a magazine while he went in to make his calls. Often these calls were made in crowded little factory settlements, where the whirr of the cotton-mills sounded through the long periods of waiting; and the houses were built so close on the street that I could hear the click of the lock as he unfastened his instrument case.

"I admit that Alfred's career generates thrills up and