‘No dress coat, no white tie, _please_. In these long June evenings one likes to stroll away as far from bricks and mortar as possible. There will not be a moon to-night. Still, even in the darkness, it will be enjoyable to breathe pure air and watch the light upon the Caskets from the jetty yonder.’ ‘And what do you think of my old friend?’ Gaston Arbuthnot asked his wife when the Thornes had departed on their different roads--the Doctor to visit a patient in Miller’s Hotel; Linda, her dress, a caviller might say, scarce fitted to the work, to her poor dear brothers and sisters in the alleys. ‘I have listened to Linda Thorne’s verdict on you. Now for the reverse of the medal. What do you think of Linda Thorne?’ ‘I think her vulgar.’ It was the first time Gaston had heard judgment so harsh from Dinah’s lips. Hers was the least condemnatory of human souls. She shrank with a rare modesty from giving opinions on the people with whom Gaston associated, was openly unashamed always of her own lowly origin, and of her inability to discern the finer shades of a society to which she was not born. A slight tinge of red kindled on Arbuthnot’s cheek. ‘Vulgar is a strong word. Women are not always generous in their strictures upon each other. Yet it happened that Mrs. Thorne was singularly generous in her criticism of you. Linda thinks you beautiful, my dear. She said yours was the first face she has ever seen without a flaw.’ ‘Standing close beside me as you did, Mrs. Thorne would have shown delicacy by not talking of me at all. Although I tried not to listen, I heard too well what she said. It was those flatteries of Mrs. Thorne’s, for of course I am no judge of manner, which made me think her vulgar. A lady at heart would have known how you must wince on hearing me so coarsely praised.’ For one moment Gaston Arbuthnot’s looks were threatening, then the cloud passed. ‘I believe you are half right, my dear girl,’ he observed, in his sunniest voice, and picking up his wife’s hat from the spot where it had fallen at her feet. ‘But people of the world are not as transparently truthful as you, my Dinah. You shoot at the bull’s eye when you do discharge an arrow, and seldom miss the mark. Now, let me tie your hat strings! Lift your chin--so! Let us wander off to the sea and forget all the insincerities, all the Linda Thornes in existence.’ The speech must have been uttered with some of the airy mental reservation that Gaston Arbuthnot’s habit of ‘poker talk’ made easy to him. He did not for one instant forget that he was engaged to dine that evening at The Bungalow; engaged, although there was no moon, to enjoy pure air and watch the light upon the Caskets from the jetty yonder. CHAPTER III HAS HE A WIFE? ‘The battle is to the strong, Marjorie Bartrand; the race to the swift. Women have been fatally handicapped since the world began. And Nature understands her own intentions, depend upon it, better than we do.’