Cavencliffe was a great, roomy country-house, in the Colonial style, furnished in chintz and cretonnes, light and airy, with wicker furniture and bird's-eye maple throughout, save in the dining-room, where there was the slenderest of old Hepplewhite. Wide piazzas flanked the house on every side, screened and awninged from the sun and wind and rain. A winding driveway between privet hedges, led up from the main road half a mile away, through a maze of giant forest trees amid which the place was set. Croyden watched it, thoughtfully, as the car spun up the avenue. He saw the group on the piazza, the waiting man-servant, the fling upward of a hand in greeting by a white robed figure. And he sighed. "My last welcome to Cavencliffe!" he muttered. "It's a bully place, and a bully girl--and, I think, I had a chance, if I hadn't been such a fool." Elaine Cavendish came forward a little way to greet him. And Croyden sighed, again, as--with the grace he had learned as a child from his South Carolina mother, he bent for an instant over her hand. He had never known how handsome she was, until this visit--and he had come to say good-bye! "You were good to come," she said. "It was good of you to ask me," he replied. The words were trite, but there was a note of intenseness in his tones that made her look sharply at him--then, away, as a trace of color came faintly to her cheek. "You know the others," she said, perfunctorily. And Croyden smiled in answer, and greeted the rest of the guests. There were but six of them: Mrs. Chichester, a young matron, of less than thirty, whose husband was down in Panama explaining some contract to the Government Engineers; Nancy Wellesly, a rather petite blonde, who was beginning to care for her complexion and other people's reputations, but was a square girl, just the same; and Charlotte Brundage, a pink and white beauty, but the crack tennis and golf player of her sex at the Club and a thorough good sport, besides.