"Business, Kate. Business," he declared, importantly.

Elinor laughed in pleasant irony.

"Business!" she repeated.

"I said, 'business,'" he retorted.

"Yes," she rejoined; "but you can't prove it."

"Can't eh?" he inquired. "Well, you go back to the wicked metropolis and you'll find that my rent is paid and that a coupon's been cut from one of my bonds. And who did it, I'd like to know?"

"Oh, your secretary, or the janitor, or somebody," returned Elinor, easily. "Not you."

Tom laughed.

"I must have a very negligible reputation for industry in this menage.

How do you think I spend all my time?"

Elinor, arms akimbo, half faced him.

"Well, Mr. Bones," she asked. "How do you spend all your time?"

He grinned at her, friendlily.

"Feeling better, aren't you?"

"I feel so well," she returned, "that if this doctor of mine weren't such a Simon Legree, I could play you eighteen holes of golf for a box of gloves against a box of cigars."

"Gambler!" he scoffed. "And if I should win, I suppose I'd have to smoke the cigars."

"Certainly," she countered, easily, "if I should have to wear the gloves."

He sank back in the big chair.

"Well," he a.s.serted, "it were useless to speculate on that which may never be. I am at present in that interesting state of a man's career where golf doesn't belong. A man who is beyond the first flush of adolescence and not yet in the last pallor of senility, has no business dallying with golf. He's liable to get sunstruck."

Muriel, who had been listening with round, wondering eyes, ran to her mother.

"What does he mean, mother dear?" she asked.

Elinor replied instead, laughing.

"n.o.body knows, Muriel. Not even he."

"Now that's unkind, Nell," protested Blake; "unkind though true."

The child, eyeing them for a minute in serious non-understanding, recurred with the facility of the very young to other things.

"Oh, mother dear!" she cried. "We forgot to stick up our letters to daddy."

Taking her mother's hand, she led her to the little table. Elinor, left alone with Blake, turned to him and queried:

"Heard from Jack lately?"

He shook his head.

"Not lately. Not since I've seen you."

"Not enjoying himself much, I suppose," she commented. "He always stuck to this place in summer like a barnacle. Was crazy about it."

Blake, sitting with left fist in right palm, eyes upon the velvety green of the lawn, shook his head, slowly.

"He shouldn't have left a home like this if they'd offered to make him Queen of Sheba," was his comment.

Kathryn had turned to him. There was in her eyes a frank gladness--a sincere welcome. She was glad to see him; how glad, she herself scarcely knew. She had few friends; for there were but few people for whom she really cared. She had known Blake for many, many years--known him and liked him, and liking, had respected. He was of the few men whom money, and bachelorhood, have no power to spoil. And they are few indeed. The one has power to spoil, you know, even as has the other; and both together--unusual indeed is the man who can resist.

"It's good to see you again, Tom," she declared. "It's been lonely here.... And I never thought that would happen."

"It's good to be here," he returned, looking steadily upon her. "It's good to be here, Kate. It's a perfect place, this--perfect."

Elinor had risen; plucking a bending blossom, inhaling of its delicate fragrance, she had wandered through the broad archway of the arbor, toward the Sound.

There was a moment of silence. There came from between Blake's lips a deep sigh.

Kathryn looked up, quickly.

"What's the matter, Tom?"

He shook his head again.

"I don't know. Sometimes things go all wrong--dead wrong--and no one can tell why, or how, or what to do."

"Why, Tom!" she cried. "What do you mean? Has anything--"

"Mean?" he interrupted. "Oh, nothing. Nothing, of course. I--I guess it's loneliness. There are a lot of people who think because I have a motor to smell, a yacht to make my friends seasick and a club window to decorate, that I'm contented with my lot. But at heart I'm the most domestic individual that ever desecrated a dinner coat; and sometimes the natural tendencies of the gregarious male animal will not down. There's too much of the concentrated quintessence of unadulterated happiness lying around here. Maybe that's it."

"We have been happy here, Tom--very, very happy." Then, quickly: "I'm sorry, Tom.... I understand, and I'm sorry."

He smiled.

"It's nothing, Kate," he declared, "nothing at all. You've got to expect a bachelor to kick every once in a while, you know. They're a peevish lot of old guys."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER TWENTY.