a milky haze:  luncheon somewhere, more new acquaintances, and then, perhaps, in Lily’s light wood victoria to meet the train of trains.  For at half-past five the little station, forlorn all day long in the midst of the twisted cedars that grew out of the heated sand, assumed an air of gayety and animation.  Vehicles of all sorts drew up in the open space before it, wagonettes, phaetons, victorias, high wheeled hackney carts, and low Hempstead carts:  women in white summer gowns and veils compared notes, or shouted invitations to dinner from carriage to carriage.  The engine rolled in with a great cloud of dust, the horses danced, the husbands and the overnight guests, grimy and brandishing evening newspapers, poured out of the special car where they had sat in arm-chairs and talked stocks all the way from Long Island City.  Some were driven home, it is true; some to the beach, and others to the Quicksands Club, where they continued their discussions over whiskey-and-sodas until it was time to have a cocktail and dress for dinner.

Then came the memorable evening when Lily Dallam gave a dinner in honour of Honora, her real introduction to Quicksands.  It was characteristic of Lily that her touch made the desert bloom.  Three years before Quicksands had gasped to hear that the Sidney Dallams had bought the Faraday house —­or rather what remained of it.

“We got it for nothing,” Lily explained triumphantly on the occasion of Honora’s first admiring view.  “Nobody would look at it, my dear.”

It must have been this first price, undoubtedly, that appealed to Sidney Dallam, model for all husbands:  to Sidney, who had had as much of an idea of buying in Quicksands as of acquiring a Scotch shooting box.  The “Faraday place” had belonged to the middle ages, as time is reckoned in Quicksands, and had lain deserted for years, chiefly on account of its lugubrious and funereal aspect.  It was on a corner.  Two “for rent” signs had fallen successively from the overgrown hedge:  some fifty feet back from the road, hidden by undergrowth and in the tenebrous shades of huge larches and cedars, stood a hideous, two-storied house with a mansard roof, once painted dark red.

The magical transformation of all this into a sunny, smiling, white villa with red-striped awnings and well-kept lawns and just enough shade had done no little towards giving to Lily Dallam that ascendency which she had acquired with such startling rapidity in the community.  When Honora and Howard drove up to the door in the deepening twilight, every window was a yellow, blazing square, and above the sound of voices rose a waltz from “Lady Emmeline” played with vigour on the piano.  Lily Dallam greeted Honora in the little room which (for some unexplained reason) was known as the library, pressed into service at dinner parties as the ladies’ dressing room.

“My dear, how sweet you look in that coral!  I’ve been so lucky to-night,” she added in Honora’s ear; “I’ve actually got Trixy Brent for you.”