"By your new household arrangements." "Well, I shall have back my chum." Randolph put forward the alternative. "I was afraid, for a moment, that you might be taking a wife." "A wife?" "Yes. Such a rescue often leads straight to matrimony--in the story-books, anyhow." Cope laughed, but with a slight disrelish. "We're in actual life still, I'm glad to think. What I said on one stretch of the shore goes on the other," he declared. "I don't feel any more inclination to wedded life than ever, nor any likelihood"--here he spoke with effort, as if conscious of a possible danger on some remote horizon--"of entering it." "It _would_ have been sudden, wouldn't it?" commented Randolph, with a short laugh. "Well," he went on, "one who inclines to hospitality must work with the material at his disposal. I shall be glad, on some occasion or other," he proceeded, with a slight trace of formality creeping into his tone, "to entertain your friend." "I shall be more than glad," replied Cope, "to have you meet." 18 _COPE AT THE CALL OF DUTY_ Cope took his own time in calling upon the Ashburn Avenue circle; but he finally made, in person, the inquiries for which those made by telephone were an inadequate substitute. Yet he waited so long that, only a few hours before the time he had set, he received a sweet but somewhat urgent little note from Amy Leffingwell suggesting his early appearance. He felt obliged to employ the first moments of his call in explaining that he had been upon the point of coming, anyway, and that he had set aside the present hour two or three days before for this particular purpose: an explanation, he acknowledged inwardly, which held no great advantage for him. "Why am I spinning such stuff?" he asked himself impatiently. Amy's note of course minimized her aid to him and magnified his aid to her. All this was in accord with established form, but it was in still stronger accord with her determination to idealize his share in the incident. His arm _had_ grasped hers firmly--and she felt it yet. But when she went on to say--not for the first time, nor for the second--how kind and sympathetic he had been in supporting her chin against those slapping waves when the shore had seemed so far away, he wondered whether he had really done so. For a moment or two, possibly; but surely not as part of a conscious, reasoned scheme to save. "She was doing all right enough," he muttered in frowning protest.