from the ill-ventilated rooms behind his office, to the great, square, front bed-room of the Pope house, whose windows looked out upon the roof of the porch that had been used to be their stage-box, from which they had watched the play of small town life. For by now she saw less and less of Doc. His practice had grown enormously. The old pleasant evenings were long past. Doc drove late; but late as he drove, when he came in there was always something waiting for him-something Doc specially likedto eat and to drink. Sometimes Lily, too, was waitingfor she was more and more obsessed by a strange passion -a passion for seeing him—for feeling him near.. Poor Lily was in hardly better case than those many among whom Doc practiced that simple art of his of turning girls' heads. Doc didn't like her to wait up. Lily was not so pretty of late; and she showed on such occasions a certain midnight strain of waiting. He would pat her shoulder with his cub-like caress, and tell her to "run along." Lily had begun to be afraid, of something she did not name.

...

Lena was in her little bedroom. It was plain almost to meagreness; but it might have been a throne-room. The young dentist's bassinet, which had been contrived out of a clothes-basket, held a quantity of small, tufted quilts, but he squirmed redly on his mother's arm. He regarded Lily unblinkingly; but Lena exclaimed with a sort of joyous pity. The two had not seen much of each other lately-since Lena's prospects. And then, it made a difference-the one, a matron; the other still, for all their equal years, only a girl. Lena saw, in swift appraisal, how Lily had gone off. Lena herself had had no especial beauty-only youth. Now Lily saw her, as it were, bathed in beauty. Her fair hair, ruffled a little by

the pillow, spread outward; the light, between a gaping curtain, struck through the meshed net of it with a curious suggestion as of a nimbus. She looked down at the child on her breast.

"O Lena!" said Lily. (And O-to think-it might have been-)

"O Lily!" cried Lena, in a sort of rapturous pity.

Lena's mother came forward disapprovingly, and took the baby. She had been Lena's nurse. Her starched skirts and apron and manner stiffly disavowed any responsibility for temperature or like ills; but she continued to croon over and over to the baby:

"And did its naughty, naughty muzzer wake it up-the p'ecious-and did its grannie have to take it up-the lamb?"

"Mother," said Lena, when Lily rose to go, "show Lily the house." It was in effect as though she said: "Show Lily the castle, the moat and the drawbridge; the donjon, the forests, the game preserves, and all the ancient possessions of the House of Dalbey." Such pride of name and race was in her voice.

Lena's castle had four rooms; and its donjon was a tidy cellar with canned fruits upon its shelves. The Pope mansion had velvet portières, lace curtains, and chandeliers; Lena's curtains were of scrim, and her finest lamp a glass-bowled one, with a frosted wreath running round. The dentist came home before Lily got away. She had never thought much of him-a plain type. What could one expect-taking Lena upstairs, back of his office, to start housekeeping. . . . Still-here was the castle; it had materialized, after those bleak rooms

.. here was the heir... here was something, that for all its Brussels, its hangings, its great globes depend

ing from the ceiling in winy-golden light, the Popes' house did not possess.

By now Doc's fortunes had reached a flourishing state. He ceased to borrow. His office fees alone were reported to reach a fabulous figure. Rows of patients warmed the chairs in his waiting-room. People began to wonder what Doc and Lily were waiting for. Lily herself wondered; and Mrs. Pope was quite outspoken. She threatened to inquire of Doc "what his intentions were in regard to her daughter." Lily, with difficulty, dissuaded her. She told her they had 'an understanding'. These words, as she said them, had, to her acute and troubled consciousness, a vague menace. All those othersthose fresh and pretty girls of the countryside, had had an understanding. . .

The summers had a way of going by. Lily feared to number them—so short in retrospect, so terribly long in realization. Lena Dalbey's baby had toddled through three, and now Lena and her dentist, walking on a Sunday afternoon, wheeled the young dentist's sister in his outgrown coach. The Dalbeys had lately put an addition to the castle-two rooms and a buttery; and Lena was wearing a new summer silk-gray, with a black pin stripe. The strange latent beauty had deepened in her face. Lily wondered how she could ever have thought her plain.

Lily had only dresses to number her summers by. There was the one when she had worn the white with lavender trimmings; and another when she had had the embroidered flounce; there was the rose lawn summerand the checkered silk one-too many to count . . . to remember.

Something too, something dreadful, ailed her hair.

She no longer swept it up from her face-it made her look, somehow, too thin. But that was not the real reason. On the temples, hidden beneath the folds, it had begun to turn a premature gray. Lily experimented with many tonics, washes, and even, fearfully, with a stain. But although she was able, temporarily, to disguise the grayness, she perceived of a sudden, that the old thick resistance was no longer there no stain could restore the old luxuriance.

Once Doc, smoking comfortably on the Pope piazza, with a pitcher of iced lemonade on the little round wicker table at his side-(that summer they had bought a set of wicker porch furniture) removed his cigar, described a glowing arc with the tip of it, and remarked of a bevy of passing school girls: "There's your bouquet! That one in the middle-by Gad, she's a looker!"

Lily's eyes rested upon the girl Doc had been pleased to designate as a looker. It was Ruby Dobler. Ruby had been running up summers too, and now she was a senior in High School. She no longer dangled; tall as she was, she had a sort of immature grace. She had put

up her hair for the first time this summer, and the braids were wound coronet-wise about her head. These wound braids made a sort of twisted frame, like the spiral winding of old cameo settings, out of which shone her face, like a delicate, gleaming miniature.

The old menace that had laid hidden beneath the ugly, dangling, gingham exterior of the little Dobler girl, sprang up to face Lily. The unconscious young girl, moving serenely on with her companions, had observed Lily in her turn only as a shadow. If some vague memory of those little girl days, when she had hung over the front gate and dipped into her first volume of Romance as ex

emplified in the persons of Lily Pope and Doc Greer, recurred to her, it was but shadowy and fragmentary. One of the girls glanced back a little curiously: "How long have they gone together, anyway?" "I can't remember when they haven't been going together!" rejoined another, striving to pierce the dark ages of the

teens.

They promptly forgot all about it. But Lily did not forget. There was something threatening in the realizations the years brought-the Dalbeys' children and the renovated castle, and the Dobler girl growing up. The understanding between her and Doc-Lily had always called him "Doctor," proudly and proprietarily-seemed now strangely more and more misunderstanding. She put out her hand with a sort of searching, pitiful gesture -it wavered to his shoulder. Doc put up his great paw and patted it in the old cublike caress. "Getting on-Lily, eh? Just like old married folks, you and me."

Lily nerved herself to a strange desperate courage. "What are we waiting for, Doctor?" Doc purred his great, comfortable bass purr. "Tired of waiting, eh?" He brushed Lily's hand aside with a sort of careless tolerance, waving the subject aside as well. "You should've seen 'em in the waitin'-room today-forty dollars in office fees alone. Had to leave in the middleanother old woman turned up her toes. Chuck Taylor's mother-in-law-these mother-in-laws are fierce."

This disconcerting reference to the relationship Mrs. Pope must ultimately bear him, silenced Lily. She sat very still, looking out, tense and removed, beyond the dark curtain of shadow, like a spectator gripped by some stage play. It may be that Lily had become conscious for