"He asked me once just what I thought of her, and I told him. We never discussed her again." "No?" Inwardly Patsy was tabulating why Billy Burgeman had not gone to his friend when Marjorie Schuyler failed him. He would hardly have cared to criticize the shortcomings of the girl he loved with the man who had already discovered them. "What are you two jabbering about?" Janet Payne had left her group and the hectic argument over fashions. "Sure, we're threshing out whether it's the Irish or the suffragettes will rule England when the war is over." "Well, which is it?" "Faith! the answer's so simple I'm ashamed to give it. The women will rule England--that's an easy matter; but the Irish will rule the women." "Then you are one of the old-fashioned kind who approves of a lord and master?" Gregory Jessup looked up at her quizzically. "'Tis the new fashion you're meaning; having gone out so long since, 'tis barely coming in yet. I'd not give a farthing for the man who couldn't lead me; only, God help him! if he ever leaves his hands off the halter." The laugh that followed gave Patsy time to think. There was one more question she must be asking before the others joined them and the conversation became general. She turned to Janet Payne with a little air of anxious inquiry. "Maybe you'd ask the rascally villain who kidnapped me, when he has it in his mind to keep his promise and fetch me to Arden?" As the girl left them Patsy turned toward Gregory Jessup again and asked, softly: "Supposing Billy Burgeman has fallen among strangers? If they saw he was in need of friendliness, would it be so hard to do him a kindness?" The man shook his head. "The hardest thing in the world. Billy Burgeman has been proud and lonely all his life, and it's an infernal combination. You may know he's out and out aching for a bit of sympathy, but you never offer it; you don't dare. We could never get him to own up as a little shaver how neglected and lonely he was and how he hated to stay in that horrible, gloomy Fifth Avenue house. It wasn't until he had grown up that he told me he used to come and play as often as they would let him--just because mother used to kiss him good-by as she did her own boys." Gregory Jessup looked beyond the firs to the little lake, and there was that in his face which showed that he was wrestling with a treasured memory. When he spoke again his voice sounded as if he had had to grip it hard against a sign of possible emotion.