After lunch, Lois disappeared.  She came back resplendent for the races, when coffee had long been finished in the drawing-room.

“Why aren’t you ready, Laure?” she demanded.

“I’m not going, darling.”

“Lois,” Mr. Ingram exhorted, “don’t forget the afternoon is to be spent in literary composition.”

“It isn’t,” Laurencine contradicted.  “I may as well tell you I’ve written all I mean to write in the way of letters for one day.  But I don’t want to go, really, Lois darling.”

“No.  She wants to think,” Mrs. Ingram explained.

Lois set her lips together, and then glimpsed herself in the large mirror over the anthracite stove.  She looked too rich and complicated for that simple drawing-room.

A performance on a horn made itself heard in the street below.

“There he is!” said Laurencine.

She opened a window and ran out on to the balcony and leaned over; then glanced within the room and nodded.  George had assumed that Irene Wheeler was the author and hostess of the race-party, and he was not mistaken.  Irene’s automobile had been sent round to embark him and the girls.  Mrs. Ingram urged him to come again the next day, and he said ardently that he would.  Mrs. Ingram’s ‘affair’ with him was progressing rapidly.

“But I hope you’ll call me George, then,” he added.

“I may!” she said.  “I may!  I may go even further.”

Lois and George descended the stairs in silence.  He had not seen her, nor written to her, since the night of the comedy when he had so abruptly left the box.  Once or twice at the Ingrams’ he had fancied that she might be vexed with him for that unceremonious departure.  But she was not.  The frank sigh of relief which she gave on reaching the foot of the interminable stairs, and her equally frank smile, had no reserve whatever.

The chauffeur’s welcoming grin seemed to indicate that he was much attached to Miss Ingram.  He touched his hat, bowed, and spoke to her at some length in French.  Lois frowned.

“It seems Miss Wheeler doesn’t feel equal to going out this afternoon,” she translated to George.  “But she insists that we shall use the car all the same.”

“Is she ill?”

“She’s lying down, trying to sleep.”

“Well, then, I suppose we’d better use the car, hadn’t we?”

Lois said seriously: 

“If you don’t object, I don’t.”

IV

At Longchamps the sun most candidly and lovingly blessed the elaborate desecration of the English Sabbath.  The delicately ornamented grand stands, the flags, the swards, the terraces, the alleys, the booths, the notice-boards, the vast dappled sea of hats and faces in the distant cheaper parts of the Hippodrome, were laved in the descending, caressing floods of voluptuous, warm sunshine.  The air itself seemed luminous.  The enchantment of the sun was irresistible; it stunned