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He recalled the long dull spring in New York after his break with Susy, the weary grind on his last articles, his listless speculations as to the cheapest and least boring way of disposing of the summer; and then the amazing luck of going, reluctantly and at the last minute, to spend a Sunday with the poor Nat Fulmers, in the wilds of New Hampshire, and of finding Susy there Susy, whom he had never even suspected of knowing anybody in the Fulmers' set!

"Oh, not these children. They're so good to me." "Ah, well, I suppose it won't be for long." He sent his eyes again about the room, which his absent-minded gaze seemed to reduce to its dismal constituent elements, and added, with an obvious effort at small talk: "I hear the Fulmers are not hitting it off very well since his success. Is it true that he's going to marry Violet Melrose?"

But in these rough young Fulmers she took a positive delight, and for reasons that were increasingly clear to her. It was because, in the first place, they were all intelligent; and because their intelligence had been fed only on things worth caring for.

In this mood of acquiescence even the presence of the five Fulmers seemed a natural and necessary consequence of all the rest; and when Susy at length appeared, a little pale and tired, with the brooding inward look that busy mothers bring from the nursery, that too seemed natural and necessary, and part of the new order of things.

There were, in fact, no lulls in her life with the Fulmers; but its commotions seemed to Susy less meaningless, and therefore less fatiguing, than those that punctuated the existence of people like Altringham, Ursula Gillow, Ellie Vanderlyn and their train; and the noisy uncomfortable little house at Passy was beginning to greet her with the eyes of home when she returned there after her tramps to and from the children's classes.

The exquisite Clarissa was already the predestined victim of her surroundings: her budding soul was divided from Susy's by the same barrier of incomprehension that separated the latter from Mrs. Vanderlyn. Clarissa had nothing to teach Susy but the horror of her own hard little appetites; whereas the company of the noisy argumentative Fulmers had been a school of wisdom and abnegation.

Treats so unforeseen, and of such magnitude, were rare in the young Fulmers' experience, and had it not been for Junie's steadying influence Susy's charges would have got out of hand. Susy, riding the whirlwind with her usual firmness, nevertheless felt an undercurrent of anxiety.

The case of the Fulmers was an awful object-lesson in what happened to young people who lost their heads; poor Nat, whose pictures nobody bought, had gone to seed so terribly-and Grace, at twenty-nine, would never again be anything but the woman of whom people say, "I can remember her when she was lovely."

Through all her pain she thrilled with pride at the discovery that such a possibility had long since become unthinkable to him. But she insisted. "That day at the Fulmers' have you forgotten? When you said it would be sheer madness for us to marry." Lansing stood leaning in the embrasure of the window, his eyes fixed on the mosaic volutes of the floor.

This is Friday, and I can get them let off from their afternoon classes, and keep them in the country till Monday. Poor darlings, they haven't been out of Paris for months! And I daresay the change will cure Geordie's cough Geordie's the youngest," she explained, surprised to find herself, even in the rapture of reunion, so absorbed in the welfare of the Fulmers.