For a moment longer the girl kept her hands upon his shoulders, exploring his face with eyes that seemed suddenly to have been robbed of much of their girlishness. Then: "Very well," she said coldly, and releasing him, she sat back and averted her countenance. Matthias got up, distressed and perplexed. "You can't mean your love won't stand the strain of a few weeks' separation, Joan!" She made no answer. He shrugged, moved to the work-table, found a cigarette and lighted it. "Surely you can wait that long--" "I'll do my best," she interrupted almost impatiently. "If it can't be, it can't. So don't let's talk any more about it." "I'd give a good deal to be able to arrange things the way you wish," he grumbled. "But I don't see...." She was silent. He paced the worn path on the carpet for a few moments, then turned aside to his desk and stood idly examining a little collection of correspondence which had been delivered in his absence. One or two letters he opened, skimmed through without paying much attention to their contents, and tossed aside. A third brought from him an exclamation: "Hello!" "What is it?" Joan enquired indifferently. "What do you say to running down to Tanglewood over Sunday?" "Tanglewood?" "My Aunt Helena's home--down at Port Madison, Long Island, you know. She has just written, asking us. It would be rather fun. Would you like to go?" A blunt negative was barely suppressed. Curiosity made Joan hesitate, and temporarily to forego further petulance. "I've got nothing to wear," she doubted uncertainly. "Rot: you don't need anything but shirtwaists and skirts. There won't be anybody but you, Helena, George Tankerville and myself." Matthias leaned over the back of her chair and caught her face between his hands. "It'll be a splendid holiday for us, before I start. Say yes--sweetheart!" Joan turned up her face to his, lifting her arms to encircle his neck. She nodded consent as he bent his lips to hers. XX At times Joan was more than half inclined to doubt the reality of some of those unique phases of existence to which her love affair introduced her. Some experiences seemed beyond belief, even to an imagination stimulated by inordinate ambition and further excited by incessant novel-reading and theater-going. On the Friday morning following the receipt of Helena's invitation she went shopping, squandering upwards of three weeks' savings with that delicious abandonment to extravagance which is possible only to a woman of supremely confident tomorrows. The hundreds she was in subsequent days to disburse as thoughtlessly never afforded her one-half the pleasure that accompanied the expenditure of those seventy hoarded dollars. (For aside from the rent of her room, her association with Matthias had spared her nearly every other expense of daily life.)