She laughed nervously.

“Good night,” he added, “and remember my bet.”

What could he have meant when he had declared that she would not remain in Quicksands?

CHAPTER VI

GAD AND MENI

There was an orthodox place of worship at Quicksands, a temple not merely opened up for an hour or so on Sunday mornings to be shut tight during the remainder of the week although it was thronged with devotees on the Sabbath.  This temple, of course, was the Quicksands Club.  Howard Spence was quite orthodox; and, like some of our Puritan forefathers, did not even come home to the midday meal on the first day of the week.  But a certain instinct of protest and of nonconformity which may have been remarked in our heroine sent her to St. Andrews-by-the-Sea—­by no means so well attended as the house of Gad and Meni.  She walked home in a pleasantly contemplative state of mind through a field of daisies, and had just arrived at the hedge m front of the Brackens when the sound of hoofs behind her caused her to turn.  Mr. Trixton Brent, very firmly astride of a restive, flea-bitten polo pony, surveyed her amusedly.

“Where have you been?” said he.

“To church,” replied Honora, demurely.

“Such virtue is unheard of in Quicksands.”

“It isn’t virtue,” said Honora.

“I had my doubts about that, too,” he declared.

“What is it, then?” she asked laughingly, wondering why he had such a faculty of stirring her excitement and interest.

“Dissatisfaction,” was his prompt reply.

“I don’t see why you say that,” she protested.

“I’m prepared to make my wager definite,” said he.  “The odds are a thoroughbred horse against a personally knitted worsted waistcoat that you won’t stay in Quicksands six months.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk nonsense,” said Honora, “and besides, I can’t knit.”

There was a short silence during which he didn’t relax his disconcerting stare.

“Won’t you come in?” she asked.  “I’m sorry Howard isn’t home.”

“I’m not,” he said promptly.  “Can’t you come over to my box for lunch?  I’ve asked Lula Chandos and Warry Trowbridge.”

It was not without appropriateness that Trixton Brent called his house the “Box.”  It was square, with no pretensions to architecture whatever, with a porch running all the way around it.  And it was literally filled with the relics of the man’s physical prowess cups for games of all descriptions, heads and skins from the Bitter Roots to Bengal, and masks and brushes from England.  To Honora there was an irresistible and mysterious fascination in all these trophies, each suggesting a finished —­and some perhaps a cruel—­performance of the man himself.  The cups were polished until they beat back the light like mirrors, and the glossy bear and tiger skins gave no hint of dying agonies.