She strode beside him like a goddess in the freedom of her bathing dress, her cape blowing back and away out in the new-sprung, chill wind. She had pulled off her shade hat, and her hair shone, even in the chill light, live and beautiful. Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith and Brenda Loring were taking a gossipy stroll in the rose garden when Hugh and Joan came up from the beach. “Look, my dear!” Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith exclaimed under her breath to the girl by her side, as the bathers drew near. “Did you ever see anything so radiantly perfect! They are a Greek god and goddess. And against that sea! Beautiful! I can’t understand why dear Joan holds off so. Eventually two creatures like that—so perfectly matched—must come together. Isn’t it obvious?” Brenda gave the Greek god and his goddess barely a glance, before looking beyond them to the sea which was their background. “Perhaps it’s obvious,” she responded. “Too obvious to be true. Some things are, you know.” Chapter XXVII Late afternoon. Glenn walked up the avenue at Wild Acres, back from the first day of his job on the _World_. It had been a long day, beginning at seven in the morning. He looked and was weary and disheartened, and his mouth was set in a rather bitter line. Anne, lying in a long chair in the square garden, the only patch of ground, except for a bit of lawn, which was cultivated at Wild Acres, saw him through the screen of hedge which protected her privacy, and sat up. “Glenn,” she called softly, “oh, Glenn!” He responded to the call dispiritedly enough, but came around the hedge and sat down on the foot of her chair when she had moved her legs to make room for him. She handed him a cigarette and then held a match for him. She herself had been smoking for hours, it seemed, for the grass all around her chair was littered with cigarette stubs thrown carelessly down. “How goes it?” she asked. He hesitated, then looked at her gloomily. “Have you seen the morning papers?” he asked. “Yes. The _Times_. But there’s hope for him, it seems. And it may have been only—only a temporary aberration. I’m upset too, Glenn. But there’s nothing we can do. Or will you try to see him?” Brother and sister looked startlingly alike in their anxiety and disillusionment. There were deep rings under their eyes and the general pinched and worn look that can come, even to the very young, from a long day of anguish. The morning papers on their front pages had carried a blatantly headlined story of the attempted suicide in New York the night before of the young novelist, Prescott Enderly. Failure in getting his degree at Yale was the suggested cause, but there were added some pointed hints at a love affair with an “older woman.” And Glenn had been assigned to write a more detailed story for the evening edition of his paper, because he had known Enderly at Yale.