“No savvy.”

“Why, this was the home of an Englishman named Hogg. Miss Kate uses his gunroom for her office. Are you from New Haven?”

“Yes, darlin’.”

“And you don’t know Jimmy?”

“Didn’t even know he was sick.”

“Well, Jimmy is the grandson, and I wish you would look him up. He’s a soph, and when he’s home he lives in Wickford, and his mother has got the gout, and he never never brings any Yale men up here. There’s sixty of us, Escamillo.”

“If I come, will you promise me all the dances for the first evening?”

“I will, sure as my name is Cynthia Flory.”

“I’ll come, sure as my name is Marvin Mahan.”

They prattled over the gate, and the pink of her dark cheek grew deeper. She was like musk and musk-roses. She was like the red flame of lithium.

On his return to New Haven he sought out James Endicott Hogg, whose grandfather had been British, and found him an exceedingly quiet fellow. Jimmy was blond and near-sighted and wore nose-glasses. Jimmy was going to be a mechanical engineer and was already designing safety devices.

The two men were so unlike that they took to each other at once. After the summer vacation they managed to get into one course together, and by the first of the new year they were rooming together. Week-end invitations to Wickford became a regular recurrence in Marvin’s life.

Jimmy’s widowed mother recognized in the visitor just the sort of influence needed to draw her only son out of his shell. Nothing pleased her more than to see Marvin carry Jimmy off for a dance at Eglantine and bring him back more like other men. She had got but little good out of the old home since she sold it to Kate Coggeshall, and had long felt that it ought at least to serve as an experiment station for Jimmy. He was so utterly guileless in everything but business that he was likely to be ensnared by the first creature who should perceive his earning capacity.

And what of Marvin and Cynthia? All that spring of 1914 they flirted 

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