thing you can do." 

 "Tell me," he urged. They were now nearly by the door and the two men were coming up. 

 "I have a friend. I told him that if I would agree to his plan I would send a message to him to-night. I did not mean to agree, but now—I'm not brave enough to go on. He is to be at half-past nine at a little hotel—'The Feathered Duck'—on the sea-front. Any one will tell you where it is. His name is Dunbar. He is young, short, you can't mistake him. He will be waiting there. Go to him. Tell him I agree. I'll never forget . . ." 

 Crispin's forehead confronted them. "What do you say to this? Here is a sheltered corner." 

 Dunbar? Dunbar? Where had he heard the name before? 

 They all sat down. 

 PART II: THE DANCE ROUND THE TOWN

I

 Quarter of an hour later he left them, making his excuses, promising to return at half-past ten. He could not have stayed another moment, sitting there quietly in his wicker armchair looking out on the darkening garden, listening to Crispin's pleasure in Peter Breughel, without giving some kind of vent to his excitement. 

 He must get away and be by himself. Because—yes, he knew it, and nothing could alter the vehement pulsating truth of it—he was in love for the first time in his life. 

 As he threaded his way along the garden paths that was at first all that he could see—that he was in love with that child in the shabby frock who was married to that odious creature, that bag-of-bones, who had not opened his mouth the whole evening long—that child terrified out of her life and appealing to him, a stranger, in her despair, to help her. 

 In love with a married woman, he, Charles Percy Harkness? What would his two sisters, nay, what would the whole of Baker, Oregon, say did they know? 

 But, bless you, he was not in love with her like that—no hero of a modern realistic novel he! He had no thought in that first ecstatic glow, of any thought for himself at all—only his eyes were upon her, 

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