She had kept the affair well in hand. She was playing for high stakes. She knew quite well the kind of man with whom she was dealing--that he would pay as little as possible. But she knew, too, that, let him want a thing enough, he would pay any price for it, even marriage. She was very skillful. The very ardor in her face was in her favor. Behind her hot eyes lurked cold calculation. She would put the thing through, and show those puling nurses, with their pious eyes and evening prayers, a thing or two. During that entire vacation he never saw her in anything more elaborate than the simplest of white dresses modestly open at the throat, sleeves rolled up to show her satiny arms. There were no other boarders at the little farmhouse. She sat for hours in the summer evenings in the square yard filled with apple trees that bordered the highway, carefully posed over a book, but with her keen eyes always on the road. She read Browning, Emerson, Swinburne. Once he found her with a book that she hastily concealed. He insisted on seeing it, and secured it. It was a book on brain surgery. Confronted with it, she blushed and dropped her eyes. His delighted vanity found in it the most insidious of compliments, as she had intended. “I feel such an idiot when I am with you,” she said. “I wanted to know a little more about the things you do.” That put their relationship on a new and advanced basis. Thereafter he occasionally talked surgery instead of sentiment. He found her responsive, intelligent. His work, a sealed book to his women before, lay open to her. Now and then their professional discussions ended in something different. The two lines of their interest converged. “Gad!” he said one day. “I look forward to these evenings. I can talk shop with you without either shocking or nauseating you. You are the most intelligent woman I know--and one of the prettiest.” He had stopped the machine on the crest of a hill for the ostensible purpose of admiring the view. “As long as you talk shop,” she said, “I feel that there is nothing wrong in our being together; but when you say the other thing--” “Is it wrong to tell a pretty woman you admire her?” “Under our circumstances, yes.” He twisted himself around in the seat and sat looking at her. “The loveliest mouth in the world!” he said, and kissed her suddenly. She had expected it for at least a week, but her surprise was well done. Well done also was her silence during the homeward ride. No, she was not angry, she said. It was only that he had set her thinking. When she got out of the car, she bade him good-night and good-bye. He only laughed. “Don't you trust me?” he said, leaning out to her. She raised her dark eyes. “It is not that. I do not trust myself.” After that nothing could have kept him away, and she knew it.