Blount shook his head. "No, I didn't know it; and because I didn't, I have lost an entire evening." "Oh, no; you shouldn't say that," she protested. "The evening was yours to use as you chose. Mrs. Beverley told me you were here, and she added that you had particularly requested not to be introduced to the Cranfords or their guests. Besides, you know you don't care anything about dancing." The chauffeur had placed his other passengers in the tonneau, and was trying to crank the motor. Blount was thankful that the new Italian engine was refusing to take the spark. The delay was giving him an added moment or two. "No, I don't care much for dancing; and you know very well why I couldn't, or wouldn't, be anybody's good company to-night," he said. Then: "It was cruel of you to deny me this last evening by not letting me know that you were here." "'This last evening'?" she echoed. "Why 'last'?" "Because I am leaving Boston and New England to-morrow--or rather, Monday. It is the only thing to do." "I am sorry you are taking it this way, Evan," she deprecated, in the sisterly tone that always made him hotly resentful. "It hurts my sense of proportion." "Sometimes I think you haven't any sense of proportion, Patricia," he retorted half-morosely. "If you have, I am sure it is frightfully distorted." The recalcitrant motor had given a few preliminary explosions, and a white-haired old gentleman in the tonneau was calling impatiently to Patricia to come and take her place so that he might close the door. "It is you who have the distorted perspective, Evan," she countered. "But I refused to quarrel with you last night, and I am refusing to quarrel with you now. It pleases you to believe that a woman's place in this twentieth-century world is inevitably at the fireside--her own fireside. I don't agree with you; I am afraid I shall never agree with you. Where are you going?" "I am going West, Monday." "How odd!" she commented. "We are going West, too--father and I--though not quite so soon as Monday." "You are?" he queried. "Whereabout in the West?" She did not tell him where. The car motor was whirring smoothly now, the chauffeur was sliding into his seat behind the pilot-wheel, and the old gentleman in the tonneau was growing quite violently impatient. "If we are both going in the same direction we needn't say good-by," she said hastily, giving him her hand at parting. "Let it be _auf wiedersehen_." Then the clang of the closing tonneau door and the outgoing rush of the big car coincided so accurately that Blount had to spring nimbly aside to save himself from being run down. II THE BOSS