“Have you ever read _The Love that Scorches_, by Luella Periton Phipps?” she asked. I said I had not. “I got it out of the library yesterday,” said Jane, dreamily, “and finished it at three this morning in bed. It is a very, very beautiful book. It is all about the desert and people riding on camels and a wonderful Arab chief with stern, yet tender, eyes, and a girl called Angela, and oases and dates and mirages, and all like that. There is a chapter where the Arab chief seizes the girl and clasps her in his arms and she feels his hot breath searing her face and he flings her on his horse and they ride off and all around was sand and night, and the mysterious stars. And somehow--oh, I don’t know--” She gazed yearningly at the chandelier. “I wish mother would take me to Algiers next winter,” she murmured, absently. “It would do her rheumatism so much good.” I went away frankly uneasy. These novelists, I felt, ought to be more careful. They put ideas into girls’ heads and made them dissatisfied. I determined to look William up and give him a kindly word of advice. It was no business of mine, you may say, but they were so ideally suited to one another that it seemed a tragedy that anything should come between them. And Jane was in a strange mood. At any moment, I felt, she might take a good, square look at William and wonder what she could ever have seen in him. I hurried to the boy’s cottage. “William,” I said, “as one who dandled you on his knee when you were a baby, I wish to ask you a personal question. Answer me this, and make it snappy. Do you love Jane Packard?” A look of surprise came into his face, followed by one of intense thought. He was silent for a space. “Who, me?” he said at length. “Yes, you.” “Jane Packard?” “Yes, Jane Packard.” “Do I love Jane Packard?” said William, assembling the material and arranging it neatly in his mind. He pondered for perhaps five minutes. “Why, of course I do,” he said. “Splendid!” “Devotedly, dash it!” “Capital.” “You might say madly.” I tapped him on his barrel-like chest. “Then my advice to you, William Bates, is to tell her so.” “Now that’s rather a brainy scheme,” said William, looking at me admiringly. “I see exactly what you’re driving at. You mean it would kind of settle things, and all that?” “Precisely.” “Well, I’ve got to go away for a couple of days to-morrow--it’s the Invitation Tournament at Squashy Hollow--but I’ll be back on Wednesday. Suppose I take her out on the links on Wednesday and propose?” “A very good idea.” “At the sixth hole, say?” “At the sixth hole would do excellently.” “Or the seventh?” “The sixth would be better. The ground slopes from the tee, and you would be hidden from view by the dog-leg turn.” “Something in that.” “My own suggestion would be that you somehow contrive to lead her into that large bunker to the left of the sixth fairway.” “Why?”