“Here, puss! here, puss!” With excited little shrieks and laughs they dashed by, the colonel making ineffectual grabs at their elusive skirts. Varian shook his head good-naturedly. “Too late, too late!” he called back, and taking pity on the puffing, purple colonel, he bore him off. “Thank God! I'm just about winded! I'd have dropped in my tracks,” complained the rescued man, breathing hard as they rounded the shrubbery. In the corner two figures, half seen in the dark, leaned toward each other an imperceptible moment. The colonel laughed contentedly. “When I see that sort of thing, I think we've made a mistake--eh, Varian?” he said, half serious. “It's a poor job, getting old alone. Live at the club, visit here and there, make yourself agreeable to get asked again, nobody to care if you're sick, always play the other fellow's game--little monotonous after a while, eh?” Varian nodded. “Right enough,” he said. “Different ending to their route!” suggested the colonel, jerking his elbow back toward the two in the shrubbery. “That's it!” The answer was laconic, but the pictures that swept through his brain took on a precision and color that half frightened him. He had no idea how frequently he dropped in at the little court behind the hedge after that. Sometimes he sat and mused alone there; more than once he took a surreptitious afternoon nap. He developed a dormant fancy for gardening, and walked with his new-old friend contentedly among the deserted garden paths. He studied her hair especially, wondering why it was that the little tender flecks of white attracted him so. At dinner he secretly tried to rouse in himself the same desire to stroke the gleaming silver fleece, high-dressed, puffed, and ornamented with jet, of the woman opposite him, whose hair, somewhat prematurely turned snowy, had won her a great vogue among her friends. But he never succeeded. She was absolutely too effective. She turned the simplest gathering to a fancy-dress ball, he decided. He had supposed that it was the quaint privacy of their acquaintance that charmed him particularly--the feeling of an almost double existence; but when Mrs. Dud, who, he afterwards reflected, was of course omniscient, restrained herself no longer, and thanked him with a pretty sincerity for his delicate and appreciated courtesy, intimating charmingly that she realized the personal motive, a veil suddenly dropped. He gasped, shook himself, colored a little, and met her eye. “I'm afraid I'm not so kind as you think,” he said, a little awkwardly. “I've been an old fool, I see. Do you think--is that the way _she_ looks at it?” “Mary?” said Mrs. Dud, wonderingly. “Yes, I suppose so. Why?” The naïve egotism of the answer only threw a softer light on the picture that had grown to fill his thoughts. He smiled inscrutably.