I will say, to excuse myself, that there’s few girls who wouldn’t have put their hats straight and walked their prettiest when they saw him coming. Gee—he was a good looker! Like those advertisements for collars and shirts you see in the back of the magazines—you know the ones. But it wasn’t that that got me. It was his ways, always polite, never fresh. If he’d meet me in the street he’d raise his hat as if I was the Queen of Sheba. And there wasn’t any hanging round my switchboard and asking me to make dates for dinner in town. He was always jolly, but—a girl in a telephone exchange gets to know a lot—he was always a gentleman. He lived at Firehill—forty miles from Longwood—with two old servants, David Gilsey and his wife, who’d been with his mother and just doted on him. But everybody liked him. There wasn’t but one criticism I ever heard passed on him and that was that he had a violent temper. Casey, his chauffeur, told a story in the village of how one day, when they were passing a farm, they saw an Italian laborer prod a horse with a pitchfork. Before he knew, Mr. Reddy was out of the car and over the fence and mashing the life out of that dago. It took Casey and the farmer to pull him off and they thought the dago’d be killed before they could. There was talk in Longwood that he hadn’t much money—much, the way the Reddys had always had it—and was going to study law for a living. But he must have had some, for he kept up the house, and had two motors, one just a common roadster and the other a long gray racing car that he’d let out on the turnpike till he was twice arrested and once ran over a dog. My, how well I got to know that car! When I first came I only saw it at long intervals. Then—just as if luck was on my side—I began to see it oftener and oftener, slowing down as it came along Main Street, swinging round the corner, jouncing across the tracks, and dropping out of sight behind the houses at the head of Maple Lane. "What’s bringing Jack Reddy in this long way so often?" people would say at first. Then, after a while, when they’d see the gray car, they’d look sly at each other and wink. There’s one good thing about having a crush on a party that’s never thought any more about you than if you were the peg he hangs his hat on—it doesn’t hurt so bad when he falls in love with his own kind of girl. And that brings me—as if I was in the gray car speeding down Maple Lane—to Mapleshade and the Fowlers and Sylvia Hesketh. II About a mile from Longwood, standing among ancient, beautiful trees, is Mapleshade, Dr. Dan Fowler’s place.