search title. It would cost about fifty dollars. Ewing curtly explained that he knew the "party of the first part" and no search would be necessary.

Immediately after signing the mortgage, Grace summoned him to be "seriously talked to," she said. She greeted him anxiously. Was he very sure he wanted. to take the mortgage himself? She had not thought of that; she had merely signed the papers, as he bade her. Her blue eyes besought his reassurance; her hands were clasped solicitously. Reverently he took the hands to his lips, surprised at his own temerity. She withdrew them gently. "No woman ever had a truer knight," she said, and he was exalted as one who had received the accolade.

Departing, he was brought to earth by Bridget, whom he encountered on the

A.L.

stone steps-Bridget in her durable-he hated women's clothes to look durablekhaki suit and swinging a walking-stick. He hated a woman to carry a stick. Her hair was blown about under a soft white

hat, and between her Irish-gray eyes was a little worried scowl that was unbecoming, making her look older than her five and twenty years.

Grace's eyes might fill with tears, as just now when she had brokenly thanked him; but she never wrinkled her brow or lost her sweet serenity. Grace was wonderful, incomparable. He gloried in having served her even so little.

But Bridget was talking, her frown dispelled by a little toss of the head.

"Grace says you have lots of tennis trophies, state champion cups and other relics." Ewing wondered how much of a "relic" Bridget thought him. He was not quite superannuated, even if he had neglected athletics for other pastimes. She went on cheerfully: "Grace says you will give me a most awful beating. When shall we three meet on the tennis-courts to prove her all wrong? She will referee."

"To-morrow, if you like. I know I am not in your class," he said smoothly. Bridget chuckled. She quoted:

"The devil did grin,

For his favorite sin

Is the pride that apes humility."

She whistled to the dogs, then said: "Well, beat me if you can. I play like a man, and give and ask no quarter." She nodded debonairly and ran up the steps, the Airedales bounding, as usual, at her heels. "Till three to-morrow. Beware!" she cried over her shoulder.

Such a cock-sure young person! Sam determined, indeed, to give her no quarter; no silly underhand serves, no faults overlooked, no gallant letting her have a game or two to soften defeat. No; since she played like a man let her take her beating like one. He set his jaw grimly, and with his soft hat pulled well down over his eyes he swung down the street, mollified only when the recollection of Grace's confidence in his victory fell like balm on his vexed masculinity. He liked a feminine woman.

Ten years ago the state championship had been Ewing's, and with inward relish

he donned tennis flannels and undertook to defeat the cock-sure Bridget Loveland just to show her. She might win a game or two till he got his hand in and acquired the trick of the borrowed racket; then let her take her woman's place and keep it. Grace motored him to the courts, where Bridget met them, her hair tidily confined with a black velvet ribbon. Frankly she approved his tennis togs, while the dogs leaped on him, and were kept off Grace's white suit.

"You look as comfy as an Airedale," she said, “and you have just their steady dog-look in your eyes. Has n't he, Grace?"

They played till Bridget's cheeks were aflame and her hair escaped, tousled by the wind; till her chin was smudged by a dusty ball, and her breath came fast, though her eyes were still confident. The strange racket twisted in Ewing's grip, and a blistered palm made him feel a novice. He tried old tricks of placing, only to find her here and there like quicksilver, himself, lead-footed, missing her return.

Bridget won three straight sets, then magnanimously praised his form and blamed the racket, and Grace, cool and palliating on her judge's bench, accused him of gallantry in giving Biddikins the victory.

But Ewing, resentful of such excuses, would none of them. Miss Loveland had put up a splendid game, he declared, and punctiliously he stayed to shake hands, and hope he might be beaten by her again some day, not quite so badly. The defeat was not the less galling that Bridget took it so casually.

"Get in training," she advised. "Why rust out? You are n't old, really-not over fifty?" she hazarded.

"Not forty," he corrected stiffly, and thought he detected a wicked gleam in her eye, as if she had got what she wanted.

With rather a ceremonious bow, returning Bridget's cheerful nod of farewell, he went to Grace and the car, while Bridget swung off with the delighted dogs on the two-mile walk to the farm and her piglets.

"After all, the girls we really like are the girls who are like our mothers," said Ewing, his eye resting on the feminine vision at the wheel. It might have been a distaff, so demurely Grace held herself, so unostentatiously she exerted her control.

"Our mothers never drove a car," she observed, steering dexterously between trolley-tracks, and slipping along the boulevard leading out of town.

"It is not what you do, but how," he decided comfortably, already feeling a return to the philosophic mind, "a bromide and unashamed.”

"But I am so old-fashioned!" Grace softly repined. "Compared with the modern superwoman, I 'm an uncertain, dependent creature. I am running away with you now to the woods just to have

through oak woods, with brave, blood-red leaves still clinging in the late October sun, though other trees were bare.

"Tell me my duty," she implored him. "Lately what Biddy calls my Riviera cough has returned. Harry used to take me abroad for it, you know. Nothing serious," she hastened to spare him a moment's apprehension,-"but the doctor always says 'the sunny South.' Yet can I, when my house is mortgaged? Of course Bridget knows nothing about that. Tell me what to do!" Her blue eyes besought his counsel, hung upon it.

"Of course this year it can't be the Riviera." Anxiety crept into his voice as he added, "Does the doctor suggest Florida?"

"Oh, it is too flat and uninterestingnot bracing enough, I mean, either physically or mentally. I am so foolishly sensitive to my surroundings. You will despise my weaknesses."

"No, you are so simpatica," he told her. "Of course you must be so, being you."

"So you really think I should go?" Obviously she leaned on his counsel. "Southern California?-I ought not to afford it; but-" Her little cough broke in, was suppressed.

"You have no right not to go. But not alone?" He had a futile wish that he might take her and take care of her; from a fair field of California violets carry her to rugged health. Yet to carry her mortgage was the most he could do. "Shall you take Bridget?"

"Oh, no; Biddy has her pigs to rear. Impractical loafing near to nature—that sort of thing does not appeal to her at all. I'm going, since you say I must. I can go with the Vandeleers; we are congenial spirits. They may take my doctor along, too."

"Then you will be well taken care of.". He tried to conceal his regret that the care was not to be his.

"As well as I can be taken care ofwithout you." Her light way of tossing him the crumb made it not too much of a concession for her delicate femininity, yet sufficed to send him home happy. She did

depend on him; she exquisitely implied that he was sending her away, that his word had been the decisive one for her.

He let himself deliciously recall the half-tone with which she had dropped "without you." She had meant only the gentlest friendliness, he told himself humbly, but such friendliness was heartening enough to cheer the weeks between letters after her going. These rare letters were, as Bridget put it, "worth staying home for."

"But I thought you chose to stay home with your pigs," Ewing said. As usual they had encountered, to talk Grace.

"I stayed home because some one had to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear," retorted practical Bridget. "Though I like the deadly old town, too." Her eye took him in. "You look less flabby than you were. Been gyming, it strikes me." A little surreptitious training had set him up, but he was not crowing till tennis weather, till Grace returned from drifts of violets to referee, to applaud his restored game, to soothe where Bridget had advised and challenged.

How docilely Grace would accept his mandate to remain away, to forget business and the bare, square brick house on its windy, dusty street, threatened by a clanging trolley.

That peril seemed now less imminent, he wrote consolingly against the time when she must return. There was no need to dread the trolley. The brisk lawyer who had made out the mortgage had told Ewing that the car-line would probably not come within five blocks, "more's the pity!"

"Pity?" Sam echoed him. "Why?" "It would increase the value of the property," the lawyer explained patiently to the professor; "for business, of course."

"Ah, perhaps, for business," Sam conceded. "But the old residents don't think of that; they think of their homes." He heard in fancy the pensive tone of Grace: "Bridget says rent or sell. I do not wish to do either."

"I have sent two notices of interest due," the lawyer was saying, "with no

"Oh, very well, if-" It might have been on the tip of his legal tongue to add, "if you can afford it," but he refrained, only suggesting, "The mortgage is large to hold on depreciating property, though of course it is good to sell for that yet."

"There is no question of sale," Ewing declared with finality. "The owner mortgaged it temporarily on that account."

The owner, thanking him for his news, consented to stay on at the behest of himself and Biddy, she wrote; so the first tennis weather found the house still shuttered and barred, while Bridget, living at the farm, strove for the miraculous conversion of the sow's ear into a silken purse full of ducats.

"Her Grace needs so many things!" she would say. "And I 'm just good for the getting of them." She spoke always with a joy in the doing, and Ewing worked with her, studying theories, testing them, and elated to discover that a mind trained in bacteriological research could concentrate to advantage on problems of pig culture. With his help in her problems Bridget seemed quite rid of the little worried frown. She wore the durable khaki, had her racket restrung, and with an air of preëmpting a victory already hers, challenged him to a first-of-April game.

"A day as good as another to be made a fool of," he said cheerfully, and the match was on. Ewing placed his balls neatly and unexpectedly. Bridget seemed winged. She laughed when his balls sped back to him as swiftly, till the first long. set was won by the man; then she laughed no more, but hoarded her breath and played hard. Acquaintances on the other courts applauded her service. The ease was now all on his side, his racket infallibly met the ball, and after a rally scored the point. When he had won five sets his nonchalance was unaffected; he had only claimed his own. Incredible

that a man should not beat at his own game.

"I got my hand in at the gym court," he told her. "You put up a bully game for a-" He paused teasingly as they shook hands on it.

"For a girl! Don't you dare say it!" she blazed.

"I was going to say for a beginner." "You!" she panted defiantly. "Well, you are a man," she conceded. "I used to think you were only a professor.”

Only a professor he had to be during the next three months. Early and late he tutored that hot summer, for his salary must be supplemented to meet the increased expenses of his mother's stay at the sanatorium, with the probability of an operation in the near future. By August he felt harassed and desiccated. He would have let his beard grow and renounced all exercise but for Bridget's merciless reminders of his former softness and defeat; so in the cool of the evenings they played tennis and sometimes swapped letters from Grace, who "only wished that she might share with them the coolness of the eternal snows."

For she had been persuaded to linger with the Vandeleers along the coast and in the Canadian Rockies. It seemed kinder not to break up the party. The doctor said she was being made over, and dear, independent Biddy did not need her; in fact, was freer without a clinging vine who was always begrudging her to those monopolizing pigs. She was living on her principal, and her legal adviser Professor Ewing might shake his head. If he said so, she would return.

Of course she must stay. They both wrote her so emphatically, conferring as to what arguments would be most convincing. Blithely Bridget estimated that the sow's-ear purse would bulge with ducats. sufficient to enable them to keep up the old house, which Grace had even thought of mortgaging rather than selling, though Bridget had always opposed that expedient.

"Better sell and have it over, if it comes to that. Don't you say so?" she demanded, and he evaded miserably. If he

had to foreclose, how they would both hate him!

But surely it could not come to that; she would be able to assign the mortgage. Her other friends would be glad to do what he had been privileged to be the first to offer. The Vandeleers or this doctor who "made up the party" would jump at the chance which he must forego, the chance to serve her. Some one would take it unless she could pay it off herself and so avert foreclosure.

It had come to that, so far as he was concerned, by the date of her homecoming in golden September. Again her gently summoning note had brought him to cross the common, and though the leaves were dry, he had no wish to shuffle them. He plunged through the dusk, his mind agloom with the unchivalrous part for which fate had cast him.

Rehearse it as he might, leading up to it or stating the bald, sordid facts, nothing could make it more tolerable. She had come home to dear associations, the dread trolley-track deflected, her spirit at peace, and instead of talking poetry, or their shared aversion to vers libre, he must say,

"Your money or your hearth!" He

mounted the severe stone steps and rang, following his first ineffectual push with one firm and long, thereby pulling himself together.

As on that proud occasion a year ago, when Grace had asked his help, all was welcoming; for Biddy had eagerly got things in running order, though she could n't fix flowers like her Grace. She had wisely consulted him as to the advisability. of a furnace fire a week beforehand, and had been extravagant in the matter of new copper screens, because "her Grace abhors dust, you know."

Again as on that occasion, Grace greeted him with the look that seemed to yield both hands, with the pretty reserve that held out only one. Her soft air of appeal was etherealized by a dress of delicate heliotrope; her figure against the gray-green of the high-backed chair had all the grace of a wisteria cluster offset by its leaves.

"You are looking 'frightfully fit,' as Biddy warned me." She smiled a gentle flattery which the incongruous words withheld. "It takes me back to the old days when-"

"When I shuffled the leaves and made you dusty?"

"Was I such a prig?" she demurred.

"No, but always the pink of daintiness," he said, defending her against herself, even while his mind was on the next thing. Should he rush full tilt upon her tent of peace or put off the tidings with an idea of "breaking it"? With Bridget one would have it over, the worst at once; that would be her way. But Bridget was a strong young oak standing alone. One could not tear away the support from a wisteria, pendent and clinging. He began to wish he had written; a series of letters had been kinder, a process of loosening the tendrils one by one.

"The journey was tiresome from Winnipeg east, the trippers rampant. I 've had a wonderful time, and I'm glad to be home," she lightly summarized. "You made it all possible for me by attending to that mortgage-placing. Just when I needed a man most you so beautifully filled the breach, and I felt so safe about Biddy with you here. It gave me the peace of mind to get well. I can never thank you."

"And now I 've got to undo it all-the little that I did!" He had throttled the impulse to change the subject and poke the fire, and he gripped the arms of his chair and blurted out the words that tore him, his lean face looking haggardly toward the fire, to avoid the expected distress of her bewildered eyes.

"But what do you mean?" Her tone was startled, yet not raised a note. "How can you undo your kindness? That is accomplished, a fact."

With bitter brevity he explained his mother's crisis and his own embarrassment, ending with desperate hopefulness:

"But surely, if not convenient to pay it off, you can assign it. Any of your friends would-" He broke off for her assent. It did not come, and he forced himself to