This interesting sentence was cut off by Miss Kate Lansdale, who appeared around the corner and paused politely before us, with a look of trained and admirable deafness. "Ah, Miss Lansdale," said Solon, urbanely, "I was just about to speak of you." "Dear me!" said the young woman, simply. I thought she was aghast. "Yes--but it's not worth repeating--or finishing." Miss Lansdale seemed to be relieved by this assurance. "And now I must hurry off," added Solon. "Good evening!" we both said. It seemed to be of a stuff from which curtains are sometimes made, white, with little colored figures in it, but the design would have required at least a column of the most technical description in a magazine I had subscribed for that summer. There was lace at the throat, and I should say that the thing had been constructed with the needs of Miss Lansdale's slender but completed figure solely and clearly in mind. CHAPTER XXIX IN WHICH ALL RULES ARE BROKEN Swiftly I appraised the cool perfection of her attire, scenting the spice of the pinks she had thrust at her belt. And I suffered one heart-quickening look from her eyes before she could lower them to me. In that instant I was stung with a presentiment that our treaty was in peril--that it might go fearfully to smash if I did not fortify myself. It came to me that the creature had regarded my past success in observing this treaty with a kind of provocative resentment. I cannot tell how I knew it--certainly through no recognized media of communication. Most formally I offered her a chair by the card-table, and resumed my own chair with what I meant for an air of inhospitable abstraction. She declined the chair, preferring to stand by the table as was her custom. "It was on this spot years ago," I said, laying down the second eight cards, "that Solon Denney first told me he was about to marry." Discursive gossip seemed best, I thought. "Two long yellow braids," she remarked. It would be too much to say that her words were snapped out. "And now he has told me again--I mean that he's going to marry again." "What did you do?" she asked more cordially, studying the cards. "The first time I went to war," I answered absently, having to play up the ace and deuce of diamonds. "I have never been able to care much for yellow hair," she observed, also studying the cards; "of course, it's _effective_, in a way, but--may I ask what you're going to do this time?" "This time I'm going to play the game." Again she studied the cards. "It's refining," I insisted. "It teaches. I'm learning to be a Sannyasin." Eight other cards were down, and I engrossed myself with them. "Is a Sannyasin rather dull?" "In the Bhagavad-gita," I answered, "he is to be known as a Sannyasin who does not hate and does not love anything." "How are you progressing?" I felt her troubling eyes full upon me, and I suspected there was mockery in their depths.