When Paul parted with Clarice that night he was conscious of a feeling of disquiet unusual to him. He had been angry with Clarice and made her cry. This of itself was enough to disturb him, but added to it was another feeling, novel and bewildering. Clarice was jealous of Elithe, and not altogether without cause, although until she put it into words it had never occurred to him that possibly he was too attentive to her. He had thought of her a great deal and called upon her every day. He could not help his thoughts, but he could keep from calling, and he did for four days, three of which he spent in Boston. At the close of the fourth he could stand it no longer, and on his way to the tennis court stopped at the cottage, finding only Miss Hansford, a little grim and off color as she asked where he had kept himself. He told her, and then inquired for Elithe. “Gone to the tennis court with Ralph Tracy, the Governor’s son,” Miss Hansford answered, with a good deal of elation in her voice. “Gone to the tennis court with Ralph Tracy!” Paul repeated. “I didn’t know that she knew him.” “Well, she does. He was here day before yesterday with one or two more high bucks. To-day he came with his sister to ask her to go to the court and to tell her she had been made a member.” Here was news. Paul had not been near the tennis court since he took Elithe there and quarreled with Clarice, but he started for it rapidly now, finding Elithe there playing with Ralph Tracy. Clarice had not black-balled her. She had shut her lips together when her name was proposed, but had dropped her Yes into the box with the rest and shaken hands with her as a new member when she appeared on the grounds with Ralph Tracy. Some people are long in reaching the top of society’s ladder; others get there with a bound. Elithe was of the latter class. The fashionable young men of Oak City had taken her up, attracted by her beauty, her freshness and the absence of anything conventional and stiff. She said what she thought, she laughed when she wanted to laugh. She confessed her ignorance of many things, and with her frank Western ways was altogether charming. Others besides Paul Ralston called to see her. There were invitations to clam bakes and blue fishing, and excursions on the boat, and concerts, and the skating rink, and to a ball at the Harbor Hotel. It was Paul who gave the last invitation. Clarice was in New York for a few days, and he didn’t want to go alone, he said to Miss Hansford, to whom he preferred his request, knowing that by so doing he was surer to have it granted. Miss Hansford had given in to a good deal which she once held heterodox, but she looked on dancing as something flavored with brimstone. For her niece and the daughter of a clergyman to dance would be a deadly sin. She presumed Roger would not object, she said, as the ’Piscopals were always kicking up their heels. She used to kick hers up till she learned the folly of it.