She noticed her husband not at all. "Come away, Archie," she besought the little man, staring spellbound with his big blue eyes. He had scant care for the authority of "Gad-ish," as Gladys loved for him lispingly to call her. Only when she began to plead that she had no one to help her with her flowers, to carry the pots for her, did he wrench himself from the contemplation of the flashing steel mechanism that had for him such wonderful fascination and lend his flaccid baby muscles to the fiction of help. He began zealously to toil to and fro, carrying the smallest pots wherever she bade him. Her own interest in the occupation was enhanced by the colloquy that ensued whenever she passed her small guest. "Hello, Archie!" she would call for the sake of hearing the saucy, jocose response: "Oh, oo Gad-ish!" as the juvenile convoy fared along with his small cargo. Lillian felt that she could not wait. Gladys might come at her leisure. She burst impulsively out of the door, throwing on her hat as she went, albeit wincing that she must needs pass Bayne at close quarters as he still lounged in the veranda swing. He looked up at the sound of the swift step and the sudden stir, and for one instant their eyes met--an inscrutable look, fraught with an undivined meaning. For their lives, neither could have translated its deep intendment. She said no word, and he merely lifted his hat ceremoniously and once more bent his eyes on his book. She was like a thing long imprisoned, liberated by some happy chance. Her feet seemed scarcely to touch the ground as she sped along down the ravine, then across the rustic bridge that spanned the chasm through which rushed the tumultuous mountain stream foaming among the boulders deep in its depths, and breaking ever and anon into crystal cascades. On the opposite side she soon struck into the mountain road that had been graded and tamed and improved by the hotel management into the aspect of a sophisticated driveway, as it swept up to the great flight of steps at the main entrance of the big white building. IV. The vacant hotel, bereft of the pleasure-seeking crowds whose presence seemed the essential condition of its existence, looked strangely sinister in the silent golden splendor of the clearing afternoon, with its tiers of deserted piazzas, its band-stand mute and empty, the observatory perched above the precipice, seemingly so precarious as to have all the effect of teetering in the wind.