en tete-a-tete.  “Mrs. Marshall-Smith, you’re going to stay here, of course, to look at Austin’s lovely view!  Think of his having hidden that view away from us all till now!  I want to go through the house later on, and without Austin, so I can linger and pry if I like!  I want to look at every single thing.  It’s lovely—­the completest Yankee setting!  It looks as though we all ought to have on clean gingham aprons and wear steel-rimmed spectacles.  No, Austin, don’t frown!  I don’t mean that for a knock.  I love it, honestly I do!  I always thought I’d like to wear clean gingham aprons myself.  The only things that are out of keeping are those shelves and shelves and shelves of solemn books with such terrible titles!”

“That’s a fact, Page,” said Morrison, laughing.  “Molly’s hit the nail squarely.  Your modern, economic spasms over the organization of industrialism are out of place in that delightful, eighteenth century, plain old interior.  They threw their fits over theology!”

The owner of the house nodded.  “Yes, you know your period!  A great-great-grandfather of mine, a ministerial person, had left a lot of books on the nature of the Trinity and Free Will and such.  They had to be moved up to the attic to make room for mine.  What books will be on those shelves a hundred years from now, I wonder?”

“Treatises on psychic analysis, on how to transfer thought without words, unless I read the signs of the times wrong,” Morrison hazarded a guess.

Molly was bored by this talk and anxious to get the walkers off.  “You’d better be starting if you’re going far up on the mountain, Austin.  We have to be back for a tea at Mrs. Neville’s, where Sylvia’s to pour.  Mrs. Neville would have a thing or two to say to us, if we made her lose her main drawing card.”

“Are you coming, Morrison?” asked Page.

“No, he isn’t,” said Molly decidedly.  “He’s going to stay to play to me on that delicious tin-panny old harpsichordy thing in your ’best room.’  You do call it the ‘best room,’ don’t you?  They always do in New England dialect stories.  Grandfather, you have your cards with you, haven’t you?  You always have.  If you’ll get them out, Felix and Arnold and I’ll play whist with you.”

Only one of those thus laid hold of, slipped out from her strong little fingers.  Arnold raised himself, joint by joint, from his chair, and announced that he was a perfect nut-head when it came to whist.  “And, anyhow,” he went on insistently, raising his voice as Molly began to order him back into the ranks—­“And, anyhow, I don’t want to play whist!  And I do want to see what Page has been up to all this time he’s kept so dark about his goings-on over here.  No, Molly, you needn’t waste any more perfectly good language on me.  You can boss everybody else if you like, but I’m the original, hairy wild-man who gets what he wants.”

He strolled off across the old-fashioned garden and out of the gate with the other two, his attention given as usual to lighting a cigarette.  It was an undertaking of some difficulty on that day of stiff September wind which blew Sylvia’s hair about her ears in bright, dancing flutters.