"I hardly heard what you were saying," she rejoined. "I was thinking of something else." Her voice was unusually deep and mellow, and Fessenden's sensitive ear thrilled pleasurably. He glanced toward her. She was a decided brunette. Her eyes as they met his had a certain defiant challenge, a challenge at once bold and baffling. The distance between her eyes was a trifle too great for perfect beauty, but her complexion was transparently pale, and her teeth were wonderfully white and even. The poise of her head was almost regal, and she had a trick of coming very close to one as she talked, that was very disconcerting. On the whole, Miss Yarnell was a charming person of twenty-three or four, and he began to have a decided appreciation of the adjective Polly Cresap had applied to her. Moreover, the sombre challenge in her dark eyes impelled him to further investigation, under the clatter of teacups and small talk about them. "Why 'celebrated,' Miss Yarnell?" he began. "Why 'celebrated' rather than 'beautiful' or 'stunning' or downright 'handsome'?" "Polly's rather silly," said Miss Yarnell. "Are you dodging?" "I never dodge. But Polly _is_ silly--yes, she's unkind, although she'd be in tears if she dreamed I thought so. She ought not to have called me _that_. No, I don't dodge, but I suppose I can refuse to answer." He declined to notice the ungraciousness of her response. "Oh, of course, but I'm certain to learn the reason you're 'celebrated' from some one--badly garbled, too," he laughed. Contrary to the spirit of his badinage, she seemed resolved to take him seriously. "That's true. I may as well tell you. I'm celebrated--'notorious' would be a better word--because of that affair in Baltimore last year. I was an idiot." "Hard words for yourself. I think I don't understand." "You don't know Baltimore, then?" "Very little. The Club is about all, and that not more than once or twice a year." "The Club! If you've been there once this winter, I'm afraid you've heard of _me_. I'm Madge Yarnell, _the_ Madge Yarnell, the girl who tore down the flag at the cotillion." "O-oh!" He gave her a long stare. "It was _you_." She winced before the contempt in his tone, and her eyes glistened suddenly. "I'm confessing to you," she reminded him with a humility that he knew instinctively was wholly unwonted. "I'm not proud of what I did, although some of my friends"--her glance swept over Polly Cresap--"are still foolish enough to tease me about it." Compelled by his eyes and the light touch of his hand on her arm, she rose with him, and they sauntered together to the isolation of a pillar on the porch-edge. The great bay, now purpling with the first hint of sunset, stretched from the foot of the knoll to the hazy hills of the western shore. Little red glints flashed from the surface of the water and seemed to be reflected in the depths of Miss Yarnell's sombre eyes.