"Thank you. You know me after these few weeks better than he does after all these years of--" And the Violet bent her head on Mr. Farraday's nearest arm and began to weep softly. They were in a secluded corner of the veranda of the Inn, and the Violet raged at herself for having closed the complete seclusion of Highcliff for herself and her purposes by renting it to the Trevors when she had gone to town to the rehearsals of "The Purple Slipper." And as good Dennis Farraday had no valid reason, either within or without the law for not doing so, he put consoling and comforting arms about her, and exposed his wide, silk-garbed shoulder to the rain of her tears, which were not really raining. In his big heart there was the same comforting for this conspirator as there would have been for Mr. Vandeford's lawful widow, and he administered it with the same affectionate respect that he would have used to the relict. "You're a dear, wonderful little woman!" he was saying, when the voice of the Clyde Trevors was heard calling to them from around the veranda, and an oath rose in the Violet with such force that she almost allowed it to explode. Still she felt sure of her ultimate results. "You can count on me to stand by you and the play forever," she promised, and the hurried pressure of their lips in the soft, dark, sea-perfumed air was biologically inevitable. Mr. Godfrey Vandeford had woven a tangled web when he had let fall the purple letter on the purple manuscript and gone out recklessly to follow the hunch their juxtaposition implied. CHAPTER VII The first two weeks of September spent in torrid New York were a strange period of time to have projected itself into the calm life of Miss Patricia Adair of Adairville, Kentucky. Suddenly she found herself a cog screwed tight into a rapid-fire piece of machinery that was running at top speed night and day, by name, "The Purple Slipper."