There can be nothing so dismal as pretended gayety, nothing so mirthless as hollow, empty laughter. After that startling encounter between Victor Sarbella and Helen Gilmore, both of them fighting for self-control, all five on the porch drank the toast that Joan had offered in an attempt to save the situation. Joan, of course, could not know what it was all about, but she sensed the ominous trend of things. She had seen the look of frozen terror in Helen's face, had seen the muscles bulge and rise beneath the shoulders of Sarbella's perfectly fitting dinner coat, and, while she had not glimpsed his face, it was easy to know that he, too, had experienced a distinct shock. "I have not tasted a better cocktail since my last trip abroad," exclaimed the artist, forcing a smile to his face. As a matter of fact, he had swallowed the drink mechanically, hardly tasting it. "Now for dinner!" cried Joan, taking full command of things. Putting her fingers on Sarbella's arm, she led the way into the house and toward the big, old-fashioned dining room. Kirklan Gilmore jerked himself together with visible effort; his impulse was to dash forward, face his wife and his friend squarely, demanding sternly, "What does this mean? Answer me! What does this mean?" But good breeding demanded restraint; his obligations as a host required a simulated appearance of naturalness. With a queer mental offshoot he wondered how he would have made one of the characters in his books behave under a similar circumstance. A moment or so later the five were at the dinner table. Even Mrs. Gilmore, whom nature had endowed with no large store of astuteness, realized the strain, realized that something was tremendously amiss, and she, poor and well-meaning soul, made matters all the worse by the uneasy, inquiring glances that she cast about the table in nervous bewilderment. Victor Sarbella managed to carry things off with fairly commendable grace, but not so with Helen Gilmore, who made clumsy mistakes with the table silver and not once lifted her eyes either to her husband or the others. The rouge on her cheeks made the paleness nothing short of ghastly. Kirklan Gilmore's eyes, slightly narrowed and brighter than they should have been, shot quick, queer glances from his wife to his guest. Perhaps it was but natural that his mind swept to one conclusion--a previous affair between these two. His friend and his wife! The salad fork trembled in his hand. Time after time he suppressed the impulse to leap to his feet, voicing the demand that kept shrieking through his mind: "What is there between you two?" Only Joan's persevering diplomacy kept them at fairly even keel; she rattled on with scarcely a halt. But the dinner was a thoroughly miserable affair, and by the time it came to an end the nerves of the five were raw. Joan's heart ached for the suffering she saw in Kirklan's face, and there swept through her an intensified hate for the woman who had won the man she loved.