Nancy will be safe now--as safe as if she were under an anesthetic. Mrs. Winters will take care of that. She must have a little talk with dear Isabella Winters. But that night Nancy is alone in her room--doing up her engagement ring and Oliver's letters in a wobbly package. She is not quite just, though, she keeps one letter--the first. XXVIII Margaret Crowe, who, having just come to her seventeenth birthday in this present day and generation, felt it her official family duty to season the general conversation with an appropriate pepper of heartlessness, had really put it very well. She had said that while she didn't suppose one house party over Labor Day would more than partially rivet a broken heart, it honestly was a relief for everybody else to get Oliver out of the house for a while, and mother needn't look at her that way because she was as sorry as any of the rest of them for poor old Oliver but when people went about like walking cadavers and nearly bit you any time you mentioned anything that had to do with marriage, it was time they went somewhere else for a while and stayed there till they got over it. And Mrs. Crowe, though dutifully rebuking her for her flippant treatment of a brother's pain, agreed with the sense of her remarks, if not with the wording. It had taken a good deal of quiet obstinacy on the part of the whole family to get Oliver to accept Peter Piper's invitation--Mrs. Crowe, who was understanding, knew at what cost--the cost of a man who has lost a hand's first appearance in company with the stump unbandaged--but anything would be better than the mopey Oliver of the last two weeks and a half, and Mrs. Crowe had been taught by a good deal of living the aseptic powers of having to go through the motions of ordinary life in front of a casual audience, even when it seemed that those motions were no longer of any account. So Oliver took clean flannels and a bitter mind to Southampton on the last day of August, and, as soon as he got off the train, was swung into a reel of consecutive amusements that, fortunately, allowed him little time to think. When he did, it was only to wonder rather frigidly if this fellow with glasses who played tennis and danced and swam and watched and commented athletically on the Davis Cup finals, sitting between Elinor Piper and Juliet Bellamy whom he had taken to dances off and on ever since he had had his first pair of pumps, could really be he. The two people didn't feel in the least the same. The two Mr. Crowes, he thought. “Mr. Oliver Crowe--meet Mr. Oliver Crowe.” “On our right, ladies and gentlemen, we have one of the country's greatest curiosities--a young gentleman who insists upon going on existing when there is nothing at all that makes his existence useful or interesting or proud. A very realistic wax figure that will toddle, shoot a line and play almost any sort of game until you might easily believe it to be genuinely alive. Mr. Oliver Crowe.”