With the new life and the larger ambition had come a sturdy resolve to hold himself aloof from entanglements of every sort. That Corona Baldwin was going to prove an entanglement he was wise enough to foresee from the moment in which he had identified her with the vitalizing young woman whose glove he had carried off. In fact, she was already associated in his thoughts with every step in the business battle. Was he not taking a very temerarious risk of discovery and arrest merely for the sake of proving to her that her "hopeless case" of the lawn-party could confute her mocking little theories about men and types without half trying? It was not until after Miss Corona--driving to town with her father, as she frequently did--had thrice visited the new offices that Smith began to congratulate himself, rather bitterly, to be sure, upon his wisdom in staying away from Hillcrest. For one thing, he was learning that Corona Baldwin was an exceedingly charming young woman of many moods and tenses, and that in some of the moods, and in practically all of the tenses, she was able to make him see rose-colored. When she was not with him, he had no difficulty in assuring himself that the rose-colored point of view was entirely out of the question for a man in daily peril of meeting the sheriff. But when she was present, calm sanity had a way of losing its grip, and the rose-colored possibilities reasserted themselves with intoxicating accompaniments. Miss Corona's fourth visit to the handsome suite of offices over the Brewster City National chanced to fall upon a Saturday. Her father, president of the new company, as he had been of the old, had a private office of his own, but Miss Corona soon drifted out to the railed-off end of the larger room, where the financial secretary had his desk. "Colonel-daddy tells me that you are coming out to Hillcrest for the week-end," was the way in which she interrupted the financial secretary's brow-knittings over a new material contract. "I have just wagered him a nice fat little round iron dollar of my allowance that you won't. How about it?" Smith looked up with his best-natured grin. "You win," he said shortly. "Thank you," she laughed. "In a minute or so I'll go back to the president's office and collect." Then: "One dinner, lodging, and breakfast of us was about all you could stand, wasn't it? I thought maybe it would be that way." "What made you think so?" "You should never ask a woman why; it's a frightfully unsafe thing to do." "I know," he mocked. "There have been whole books written about the lack of logic on your side of the sex fence." She had seated herself in the chair reserved for inquiring investors. There was a little interval of glove-smoothing silence, and then, like a flash out of a clear sky, she smiled across the desk-end at him and said: "Will you forgive me if I ask you a perfectly ridiculous question?" "Certainly. Other people ask them every day."