ADRIENNE TONER

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY ANNE DOUGLAS DE SÉLINCOURT
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

THIRD IMPRESSION, MAY, 1922


The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U . S . A.

PART I
CHAPTER: I, II,
III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV,
PART II
CHAPTER: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX

ADRIENNE TONER
PART I

CHAPTER I

“COME down to Coldbrooks next week-end, will you, Roger?” said Barney Chadwick. He had been wandering around the room, pausing once to glance at the César Franck on the piano and once at the window to look down at the Thames, and his voice now, though desultory in intention, betrayed to his friend preoccupation and even anxiety. “There is going to be an interesting girl with us: American; very original and charming.”

Roger Oldmeadow sat at his writing-bureau in the window, and his high dark head was silhouetted against the sky. It had power and even beauty, with moments of brooding melancholy; but the type to which it most conformed was that of the clever, cantankerous London bachelor; and if he sometimes looked what he was, the scholar who had taken a double first at Balliol and gave brain and sinew to an eminent review, he looked more often what he was not, a caustic, cautious solicitor, clean-shaved and meticulously neat, with the crisp bow at his collar, single eyeglass, and thin, wry smile.

There was a cogitative kindness in his eyes and a latent irony on his lips as he now scrutinized Barney Chadwick, who had come finally to lean against the