reassuring.

The trip to the country, of course, had been Mario's idea. It had come to him in a gaudy flash of inspiration the very evening Julie had commissioned him to do her portrait.

"Ah, Madonna Mia!" the mustachioed artist had crooned revoltingly. "You shall be my masterpiece! I can feel it now. There is the season of spring in your lovely face—the enigma, the withholding, the promise!" His dark eyes caressed her classic features, and he leaned forward abruptly. "I know!" he breathed. "I shall paint you surrounded by nature—on the very first day of spring! You will be like a goddess, with the new grasses and the first green leaves everywhere around you!" He sighed delicately. "I have never done a portrait in this manner, but how can I confine such a subject to a dismal studio?" He smiled at Julie as though Marc were not even in the room. "It is true, is it not, that you own one of the handsomest country houses in the state?"

Marc had opened his mouth to protest, but Julie's eyes were aglow with the vision of herself as a spring-time goddess. The damage had been done and there was no patching it up.

The two of them had been at the country house for a week now, looking for the perfect setting for the portrait, waiting for the perfect day to begin it. With each passing day Marc had grown a bit uneasier. Of course Mr. Busby, the caretaker, made a splendid chaperon, but there was still something about Mario that just naturally put your teeth on edge.

Business had prevented his joining the pilgrimage to the country; the summer advertising campaigns, now in preparation, demanded the last measure of his personal attention. As an active guardian of his castle and his wife's virtue, he found himself seriously hampered. With this dark thought looming in his mind, he burped anew and halted his office-bound progress to enter a drug store. A man could hardly expect to retain his clients' good will by belching in their faces.

Inside the store, he proceeded to the pharmacist's counter at the rear. There, he found himself confronted by a balding, fastidious individual in a white jacket whose gaze was fastened tenaciously on the remarkable legs of the silken brunette who presided at the nearby cosmetics counter. As Marc cleared his throat, the man looked up with eyes that were gently bemused.

"Yes?" he inquired disinterestedly.

Marc leaned forward. "I need something for gas," he 

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