was all the owner of the cottage could see—except the cigarette airily waved in her thin young hand as she chattered. He was not favourably impressed by the cigarette; but his daughters were smoking, too; and he knew he had nothing useful to say, or even to think, about that. As for the young creature's chatter, he could make nothing of it at all; so he gave up this momentary problem and went on in search of his wife. When he found her, not five minutes later, in a garden behind the house, the picture of the girl on the sofa was already merged in his mind with dozens of other new memories, all insignificant, and he did not even ask who she was.
So lightly did the man over fifty almost instantly set aside as trivial what had become the most important thing in the life of his only and treasured son. Young Nelson sat upon a stool and looked humbly up to a beglamoured and honoured sofa that was to him the seat of all beauty, grace, and wit made incarnate and gloriously visible. For three roseate days he had known the incomparable damsel, Claire Ambler, and although both of them had at first been formal, not calling each other by their first names until their acquaintance was well along toward half an hour old, Nelson was sure, by the morning of the third day,
