"Yes," she replied. "Thanks to you." "You were very ill." "One more doctor would have finished me." Of a sudden, there came from the drive the quick honking of an automobile horn, together with the soft purring of an engine. Muriel leaped to her feet; brown little legs flashed as she made her way across the garden. Kathryn and Elinor watched her going. They heard her cry, "Oh, Mr. Tom!" Another moment and Blake, carrying the child in his arms, thrust aside the bending heads of the white roses and made his way into the garden. "Hello, folks," was his greeting. "Is God in?" "Who?" demanded Elinor. "God," he returned. "This is heaven, isn't it? It certainly does seem like it to anyone who has just come from the fireless cooker that sometimes rejoices under the name of Manhattan. My old Aunt Maria! But it is hot there, though." "We're very glad to see you, Tom," Kathryn began; "although we do owe you a scolding." "What for?" he demanded, setting the child to the sward and taking off his hat. "You haven't been near us for a fortnight." He seated himself, mopping his forehead. "Business, Kate. Business," he declared, importantly. Elinor laughed in pleasant irony. "Business!" she repeated. "I said, 'business,'" he retorted. "Yes," she rejoined; "but you can't prove it." "Can't eh?" he inquired. "Well, you go back to the wicked metropolis and you'll find that my rent is paid and that a coupon's been cut from one of my bonds. And who did it, I'd like to know?" "Oh, your secretary, or the janitor, or somebody," returned Elinor, easily. "Not you." Tom laughed. "I must have a very negligible reputation for industry in this menage. How do you think I spend all my time?" Elinor, arms akimbo, half faced him. "Well, Mr. Bones," she asked. "How do you spend all your time?" He grinned at her, friendlily. "Feeling better, aren't you?" "I feel so well," she returned, "that if this doctor of mine weren't such a Simon Legree, I could play you eighteen holes of golf for a box of gloves against a box of cigars." "Gambler!" he scoffed. "And if I should win, I suppose I'd have to smoke the cigars." "Certainly," she countered, easily, "if I should have to wear the gloves." He sank back in the big chair. "Well," he asserted, "it were useless to speculate on that which may never be. I am at present in that interesting state of a man's career where golf doesn't belong. A man who is beyond the first flush of adolescence and not yet in the last pallor of senility, has no business dallying with golf. He's liable to get sunstruck." Muriel, who had been listening with round, wondering eyes, ran to her mother. "What does he mean, mother dear?" she asked. Elinor replied instead, laughing. "Nobody knows, Muriel. Not even he." "Now that's unkind, Nell," protested Blake; "unkind though true." The child, eyeing them for a minute in serious non-understanding, recurred with the facility of the very young to other things.