That Paula sometimes went for long solitary rides, Graham knew, and, once, he caught her dismounting from the Fawn at the hitching rails. "Don't you think you are spoiling that mare for riding in company?" he twitted. Paula laughed and shook her head. "Well, then," he asserted stoutly, "I'm spoiling for a ride with you." "There's Lute, and Ernestine, and Bert, and all the rest." "This is new country," he contended. "And one learns country through the people who know it. I've seen it through the eyes of Lute, and Ernestine and all the rest; but there is a lot I haven't seen and which I can see only through your eyes." "A pleasant theory," she evaded. "A--a sort of landscape vampirism." "But without the ill effects of vampirism," he urged quickly. Her answer was slow in coming. Her look into his eyes was frank and straight, and he could guess her words were weighed and gauged. "I don't know about that," was all she said finally; but his fancy leaped at the several words, ranging and conjecturing their possible connotations. "But we have so much we might be saying to each other," he tried again. "So much we... ought to be saying to each other." "So I apprehend," she answered quietly; and again that frank, straight look accompanied her speech. So she did apprehend--the thought of it was flame to him, but his tongue was not quick enough to serve him to escape the cool, provoking laugh as she turned into the house. Still the company of the Big House thinned. Paula's aunt, Mrs. Tully, much to Graham's disappointment (for he had expected to learn from her much that he wanted to know of Paula), had gone after only a several days' stay. There was vague talk of her return for a longer stay; but, just back from Europe, she declared herself burdened with a round of duty visits which must be performed before her pleasure visiting began. O'Hay, the critic, had been compelled to linger several days in order to live down the disastrous culmination of the musical raid made upon him by the philosophers. The idea and the trick had been Dick's. Combat had joined early in the evening, when a seeming chance remark of Ernestine had enabled Aaron Hancock to fling the first bomb into the thick of O'Hay's deepest convictions. Dar Hyal, a willing and eager ally, had charged around the flank with his blastic theory of music and taken O'Hay in reverse. And the battle had raged until the hot-headed Irishman, beside himself with the grueling the pair of skilled logomachists were giving him, accepted with huge relief the kindly invitation of Terrence McFane to retire with him to the tranquillity and repose of the stag room, where, over a soothing highball and far from the barbarians, the two of them could have a heart to heart talk on real music. At two in the morning, wild-eyed and befuddled, O'Hay had been led to bed by the upright-walking and unshakably steady Terrence.