But Monty did mind enormously. He had no desire to talk about the thing anyway, and Peggy's anxiety to marry him off seemed a bit unnecessary. Manifestly her own interest in him was of the coldest. From out of the gloom he looked at her somewhat sullenly. For the moment she was thinking only of his pain, and her face said nothing. "Peggy," he exclaimed, finally, resenting the necessity of answering her, "you don't in the least know what you are talking about. It is not a fit of anger on Barbara Drew's part. It is a serious conviction." "A conviction which can be changed," the girl broke in. "Not at all." Brewster took it up. "She has no faith in me. She thinks I'm an ass." "Perhaps she's right," she exclaimed, a little hot. "Perhaps you have never discovered that girls say many things to hide their emotions. Perhaps you don't realize what feverish, exclamatory, foolish things girls are. They don't know how to be honest with the men they love, and they wouldn't if they did. You are little short of an idiot, Monty Brewster, if you believed the things she said rather than the things she looked." And Peggy, fiery and determined and defiantly unhappy, threw down her cards and escaped so that she might not prove herself tearfully feminine. She left Brewster still heavily enveloped in melancholy; but she left him puzzled. He began to wonder if Barbara Drew did have something in the back of her mind. Then he found his thoughts wandering off toward Peggy and her defiance. He had only twice before seen her in that mood, and he liked it. He remembered how she had lost her temper once when she was fifteen, and hated a girl he admired. Suddenly he laughed aloud at the thought of the fierce little picture she had made, and the gloom, which had been so sedulously cultivated, was dissipated in a moment. The laugh surprised the man who brought in some letters. One of them was from "Nopper" Harrison, and gave him all the private news. The ball was to be given at mid-Lent, which arrived toward the end of March, and negotiations were well under way for the chartering of the "Flitter," the steam-yacht belonging to Reginald Brown, late of Brown & Brown.