"Derry," she murmured, "make no outside engagement for tomorrow evening. If you are already booked up, cry off. I want to dine with you in some quiet place--I suppose there is some hotel or café in Newport where none of our friends go. Find out, and send me a note, telling me the time and place. I shall come in a hired carriage, and quietly dressed--not in dinner clothes, I mean--and you must do the same. I must have a long talk with you, wholly independent of our servants, you understand." "I shall obey, at any rate," he said, with a smile that failed to conceal the unbounded surprise in his eyes. "May I put a question?" "No, not now. Full details later, as people say in telegrams." They parted, and he was so plagued by foreboding that he would have driven past the Ocean House had not the horse turned in at the gateway of its own accord. If Nancy's manner during the day had shown the least trace of worry or annoyance, he would have attributed her strange request to a desire to take him into her confidence. It was possible, for instance, that some busybody had warned her that a too marked preference for the society of one man among the many in Newport would probably reach her husband's ears; but, in that event, her outraged pride could never have been veiled by such a mask of unsullied cheerfulness. If any more drastic explanation of the next day's meeting suggested itself to his troubled mind, he crushed it resolutely. In his present mood, the slightest hint of scandal associated with Nancy's winsome personality due to their friendship was anathema. He would have endured any loss, fortune, even life itself, to save her name from besmirchment.