But these men caused him little anxiety. They were both quite young and quite callow and stood little chance with a cosmopolitan of Crabb's caliber. But there was another man of whom people spoke. His name was Heywood Pennington, and for three years he had been off a-soldiering in the Philippines. It had only been a boy-and-girl affair, of course, and most people in Philadelphia had forgotten it, but from his well-stored memory Crabb recalled at least one calf-love that had later grown into a veritable bull-in-the-china-shop. It was not that he didn't believe fully that Patricia would marry him, and it wasn't that he didn't believe in Patricia. It was only that he knew that for the first time in his life, his whole happiness depended upon that least stable but most wonderful of creatures, the unconscious coquette. Moreover, Mortimer Crabb believed firmly in himself, and he also believed that, married to him, Patricia would be safely fulfilling her manifest destiny. But the Philippine soldier kept bobbing up into Crabb's background at the most inopportune moments: once when the soldier's name had been mentioned on the _Blue Wing_, and Patricia had sighed and turned her gaze to the horizon, again at a dinner at Bar Harbor, and later in Philadelphia, at the Club. Bit by bit Crabb had learned Heywood Pennington's history, from the wild college days, through his short business career to the tempestuous and scarcely honorable adventures which had led to his enlistment under a false name in the regular army three years ago. It was not a creditable history for a fellow of Pennington's antecedents, and when his name was mentioned, even the fellows who had known him longest, turned aside and dismissed him with a word. The name of the soldier never passed between the engaged couple, and so far as Crabb was concerned, Mr. Pennington might never have existed. Patricia lacked nothing which the most exacting fiancée might require. Roses and violets arrived regularly at the Wharton country place near Haverford, and in the afternoons Crabb himself came in a motor car, always cheerful, always patient, always original and amusing. To such a wooing, placid, and ardent by turns, Patty yielded inevitably, and at last, late in September, consented to announce the engagement. The news was received in her own family circle with delighted amazement, for Mortimer Crabb had by this time made many friends in Philadelphia, and Miss Wharton had refused so many offers that her people, remembering Pennington, had decided that their handsome relative was destined to a life of single blessedness. They bestirred themselves at once in a round of entertainments in her honor, the first of which was a lawn party and masque at her uncle Philip Wharton's country place, near Bryn Mawr.