Sommers felt instinctively the hesitation in Alves's manner. She turned to him, however. "Howard, this is my brother's old friend, Mr. Jones,--Dr. Sommers." The young man shook hands with great warmth, and joined them in their walk home, talking rapidly all the way. When he left the cottage, he extended a cordial invitation to Sommers to establish himself in Painted Post. "We want a good, live, hustling doctor, one that is up in all the modern school theories," he explained. After he had gone, they sat in silence, watching the deepening twilight in the cool woods. The day, the season, the fair passion of life, seemed to wane. Like the intimations of autumn that come in unknown ways, even in August, surely in September, this accidental visitor brought the atmosphere of change. "The struggle begins, then, next Monday," Sommers remarked at last. She kissed him for reply. To love, to forget unpleasant thoughts, to love again, to refrain from an ignoble strife--alas! that it could not be thus for a lifetime. CHAPTER II The Keystone Hotel was in full blast when the doctor and Alves returned from Wisconsin. Miss M'Gann met them and introduced them to the large, parlor-floor room she had engaged for them. The newcomers joined the household that was taking the air on the stone steps of the hotel. The step below Miss M'Gann's was held by a young man who seemed to share with Miss M'Gann the social leadership of the Keystone. He was with the Baking Powder Trust, he told Sommers. He was tall and fair, with reddish hair that massed itself above his forehead in a shiny curl, and was supplemented by a waving auburn mustache. His scrupulous dress, in the fashion of the foppish clerk, gave an air of distinction to the circle on the steps. Most of this circle were so average as scarcely to make an impression at first sight,--a few young women who earned their livelihood in business offices, a few decayed, middle-aged bachelors, a group of widows whose incomes fitted the rates of the Keystone, and several families that had given up the struggle with maids-of-all-work. One of these latter,--father, mother, and daughter--had seats at table with Sommers and Alves. The father, a little, bald-headed man with the air of a furtive mouse, had nothing to say; the mother was a faded blond woman, who shopped every day with the daughter; the daughter, who was sixteen, had the figure of a woman of twenty, and the assurance born in hotels and boarding-houses. Her puffy rounded face, set in a thick roll of blond hair, had the expression of a precocious doll. When she had sounded Alves on the subject of silk waists, she relapsed into silence and stared amiably at the doctor.