He smiled in spite of the increasing gravity of the situation. "You may be sure it was not Miss Elinor." "Humph!" said Mrs. Brentwood. "She didn't tell me, either. 'Twas Brookes Ormsby, and he said he wanted to begin all over again, or something of that sort. He is nothing but a foolish boy, for all his hair is getting thin." "He is a very honorable man," said Kent. "Because he is giving you another chance? I don't mind telling you plainly that it won't do any good, Mr. Kent." "Why?" he asked in his turn. "For several reasons: one is that Elinor will never marry without my consent; another is that she can't afford to marry a poor man." Kent rose. "I am glad to know how you feel about it, Mrs. Brentwood: nevertheless, I shall ask you to give your consent some day, God willing." He expected an outburst of some sort, and was telling himself that he had fairly provoked it, when she cut the ground from beneath his feet. "Don't you go off with any such foolish notion as that, David Kent," she said, not unsympathetically. "She's in love with Brookes Ormsby, and she knows it now, if she didn't before." And it was with this arrow rankling in him that Kent bowed himself out and went to join the young women on the porch. XXII A BORROWED CONSCIENCE The conversation on the Brentwood porch was chiefly of Breezeland Inn as a health and pleasure resort, until an outbound electric car stopped at the corner below and Loring came up to make a quartet of the trio behind the vine-covered trellis. Later, the ex-manager confessed to a desire for music--Penelope's music--and the twain went in to the sitting-room and the piano, leaving Elinor and Kent to make the best of each other as the spirit moved them. It was Elinor's chance for free speech with Kent--the opportunity she had craved. But now it was come, the simplicity of the thing to be said had departed and an embarrassing complexity had taken its place. Under other conditions Kent would have been quick to see her difficulty, and would have made haste to efface it; but he was fresh from the interview with Mrs. Brentwood, and the Parthian arrow was still rankling. None the less, he was the first to break away from the commonplaces. "What is the matter with us this evening?" he queried. "We have been sitting here talking the vaguest trivialities ever since Penelope and Loring side-tracked us. I haven't been doing anything I am ashamed of; have you?" "Yes," she confessed, looking away from him. "What is it?" "I asked a certain good friend of mine to come to see me when there is good reason to believe he didn't want to come." "What makes you think he didn't want to come?" "Why--I don't know; did he?" She had turned upon him swiftly with an outflash of the playful daring which had been one of his major fetterings in time past--the ecstatic little charm that goes with quick repartee and instant and sympathetic apprehension.