inspection by the elevator boy and footman; must meet their wonder, no less obvious because dumb, at his departure before the dinner.

The heavy blankness of his waiting was broken by the gayest sound in the world. The gurgling laughter of a happy child rippled through the silence like a brook, cascading down in a cadence of chuckles. As if to confirm the recognition to which Adriance started, a girl's clear laugh joined the baby merriment. Opposite him, light showed in a thin line through a curtained doorway. Without the slightest remembrance of proprieties or conventions, he sprang that way and swung the door open.

He was on the threshold of a nursery; a room pink as the inside of a rosebud, gay with all the adorable paraphernalia babyhood demands, fragrant with violet-powder and warm as a nest. At the foot of a shining little bed, clutching the brass rail for support while executing a stamping dance, was the lord of the domain; his silk-fine, frankly red hair rumpled into glinting ringlets about his moist, rosy face, his blue eyes crinkled shut by mirth. The girl knelt opposite, steadying the chubby figure and serenely indifferent to the small, mischievous fingers that had loosened her dark hair from its braids. Without her hat, she was younger, even more wholesome and good than he had thought. She looked as fresh and candid as the damp, open-lipped kisses the baby lavished upon her.

Perhaps the intruder moved, perhaps she felt his gaze, for as he watched the girl broke up the picture. She rose abruptly, turned, and saw him standing there.

At first her startled face told only of surprise; indeed his mere presence there gave her no reason to feel more. But in his dismay and bewilderment and complete obsession Tony Adriance betrayed himself.

"I didn't know," he stammered, grasping blindly at justification and apology. "I didn't know who Holly was--or that you lived here. I am sorry; I should not have spoken----"

He stopped short. He had forgotten the fiction of a third person with which he had masked his confidence in the park; forgotten that the girl knew neither his name nor his purpose in this house. Quite without necessity he had enlightened her.

For the girl was swift of perception. Perhaps his expression alone would have told her the truth, if he had been silent. Mechanically she had put one arm around the baby, now she drew it closer, as if in protection. Her rain-gray eyes grieved, reproached, rebuked him. Possessed of Lucille 

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