“I don’t think so,” he answered. “It’s a little place, ’way up in the North Jersey hills. Swarmin’ with commuters, by now, I s’pose. I used to live there for a while, once, when I was learnin’ railroadin’. There’s a lake, with the soft green hills all closin’ down around it like they loved it. The sun used to set ’bout a mile from our house. It’d turn the lake all gold color. An’ then a blue sort of twilight would roll up through the valley. An’ the hills would seem to stretch out like they was goin’ to sleep.--Kind o’ pretty place,” he ended lamely. “You are a poet!” the girl assured him with gushing uneasiness. “I had no idea you looked at nature through such roseate glasses.” “Neither I do,” he replied, ashamed of his unwonted flight of fancy. “I was only tellin’ you how it used to seem to me when I was a half-baked kid. Since then I’ve been so busy _livin’_ that I’ve lost all the knack of gettin’ enthoosed over measly lan’scapes. They don’t mean anything to me now. As for po’try,--honest, I never wrote a rhyme in my life. Never read one neither when I could help it. Guess you was stringin’ me, weren’t you?” Nevertheless he was inwardly flattered at her praise and began to look on her with an even more favoring eye. If marriage in such a set were really the keystone to social achievement, he felt he might do far worse than choose this comely, quivering-nosed damsel at his side. “Fond of rabbits?” he asked--as unintentionally as irrelevantly. “What an odd question!” she cried, her round eyes raising incipient distress signals. “Is it a joke?” “No,” he answered, floundering, “I--I just happened to say it. You--you look just a little like one. A very pretty one of course,” he supplemented with mammoth gallantry. Her eyes, this time, hoisted the distress signal so perceptibly that Caine, skilled to read the signs, broke off in the midst of a sentence to his right-hand neighbor and engaged Caleb in momentary conversation. Letty, in the interval, stared appealingly about the board. But, thanks to her own success in drawing Conover into _tête-à-tête_, the others were not, at the instant, noticing either of them. Thrown upon herself for comfort, she decided the rough guest had intended his asinine remark as a compliment. The thought did much to console her. She glanced, sideways, at him, with a new interest; and, Caine, relieved, saw the ‘Fair Weather’ standard flying once more.