Mark, too, had his dreams,—wakeful ones,—which for a long time would not let him sleep. Every pulse was vibrating with the feverish madness which had possessed him since he first looked into Helen Tracy’s face and had strengthened with each moment he had been with her. “I’ll win her, too,” was his last conscious thought, as he dropped into an uneasy sleep, in which Helen and ’Tina and Paul and Virginia were pretty eagerly blended. Helen also had her dreams or schemes, which she communicated to Alice, whom she asked into her room before going to bed. “It is quick to make up my mind when I have only known them a day,” she said, “but it seems to me I have known them years, so much happened in that absurd drive with those wretched _bloods_, as Mr. Taylor calls them. I am perfectly fascinated with Apollo, notwithstanding the terrible thing he told us. I was so sorry for him I could have cried. Mrs. Taylor told me some of the story after supper when you were on the piazza. It is very interesting, but too long to repeat to-night. It was a case of a woman loving some man better than her husband and getting that man to kill him. It often happens, you know. The great-grandfather was a Dalton,—a splendid family. Mamma has heard of them. There’s a governor and a judge and a good many more things somewhere, but they have always ignored Apollo’s branch because of that woman, ’Tina somebody. She was from a good family, too,—but if a woman does not love her husband and does love some one else, what would you have?” “Not murder, certainly,” Alice said, vehemently, and Helen replied, “Of course not. How you startled me, and how funny you look, as if I were defending ’Tina. I am not. I am defending Mr. Hilton, and shall treat him just the same as if his grandmother hadn’t killed somebody. If he were only the Sphinx and the Sphinx were Apollo, I should be so glad. There is more warmth, more magnetism about him, but it is not to be thought of. Helen Tracy and a hotel clerk! That would be funny. He must have sense enough to know it, so there will be no harm in enjoying myself with him, and being in earnest with the other one, of whom I really think I can learn to be fond. It came to me when I was sitting on the wall with his arm around me, and you all thinking I was faint.” “And weren’t you?” Alice asked, in a voice which made Helen look at her quickly, as she answered, “Not a bit. I was tired walking up that horrid hill in boots a size too small and which hurt me every step I took, but I wasn’t faint. I was making believe.”