But she eluded him in other more intangible ways. Take this matter of her age. Was she twenty-something or was she forty-something? Wasn't the girlishness more in her manner, in the slightness of her person, than in any real freshness? ... Her face had sometimes a soft sag, a worn pallor to it. He was inclined to think that she couldn't be over thirty-three. (Bloomer himself was just thirty.) But he did not know he did not know anything about her! She told you nothing of any relevance or importance about herself. If she did just mention that a great-grandfather had been governor of Maryland, she dropped it as something trivial; while if she told you how she and her sisters, as children, had dressed up black-eyed Susans in grass skirts to look like Hawaiian dancers, she described that in detail, as though it were an affair of importance. . . .

Their unnatural isolation may have had something to do with it. Usually Bloomer was afforded some outlet in a gossiping, sociable condescension toward members of his own class. Here he was quite cut off. He and Miss Tait were alone, and paired by the criticism of cook and Celia. Miss Tait was as uncompanioned as he was. All that reached her from the outer world was a trickling of letters with the British postmark and bales of papers of a heavy political nature, which swamped her for several days at a stretch. Bloomer came to hate those papers. He came to hate her absorbed reactions: "This question of cancelling the war debt, Bloomer.

Hm, League of Nations-what do you think-?" The women whom he had worked for in the past had annoyed him in various ways-had sent him on shopping tours with shreds of silk to match to spools of thread, etc. But no one of them had ever pestered him by soliciting from him opinions of a deep political nature. Bloomer knew suddenly that he loathed and detested government and intellectual interests in a woman. His feeling on the subject was so strong that it amounted to

Mostly Bloomer was able to blink the significance of his own disturbed state. The days ran their gamut of weather moods, from amber sunshine to silver rain; and the wedge of the distant sound ran the gamut of its corresponding color changes, from burning blue to glass gray. Bloomer was companion-gardener, playmate, even on sundry small occasionslady's maid, as well as chauffeur, to Miss Tait; and against all his rigid principles, he was strangely acquiescent to the growing intimacy. But a small thing happened one afternoon which made Bloomer suddenly aware of himself.

It was only a glance. Miss Tait, lying in a basket-chair on the lawn, had asked for pillows, and Bloomer had brought them. She submitted herself to Bloomer's arrangement of them, and looking up at him, sighed: "Isn't it funny? You think you want to be lonely, until you are and then you don't want it any more."

Bloomer, gazing down at her, found himself shaking. He got away from her abruptly. But he was at last forced to recognize the truth: not only had Miss Tait fallen for him, but he, Bloomer, was actually falling for Miss Tait!

There is no need to record the separate contortions of Bloomer's struggle against this revelation. He fought a losing battle. He tried reducing it to the nays of sense and logic, but Miss Tait had a way of creeping in between his firmest resolutions. She was within Bloomer's mind like the seep of a fog was within the garden on a pearl-colored morning, obliterating the landmarks; nothing you could do but accept the magic of it. And after all, why not? There was no great barrier between them. She was, so far as Bloomer could determine, just a little spinster leading a solitary life in some corner of the big city. Some small government position, which accounted for her bug on politics. All her relatives living in England. Damned lonely for her, he should think. And why not, then? Bigger women than she had deigned to look romantically at him. She might even have a bit of money; Bloomer rather thought she would have a small, regular income, besides her salary. He en

...

deavored to put it on a practical basis, which his common sense could approve. But really, it was not Sally Tait's money, but her eyes. .. Yes, he was calling her "Sally" in imagination, was figuring in terms of a little apartment for two. ...

So affairs stood on the day of the tempest. They had started, in mid-afternoon, for a ride and tea. Miss Tait wore the floppy straw hat which was certainly a motoring abomination, and the car-top was down-she insisted upon it-leaving them naked on their high-decker, exposed to ridicule and to a blistering sun. Miss Tait had byway and backwater tastes. Usually they did the side-roads and the stuffy little tea-rooms which no one of any social prominence ever visited. This suited Bloomer. But to-day they stuck to the country roads only long enough for Bloomer to get well muddied from retrieving some large pink flowers from a swamp. Then Miss Tait caught a glimpse of pine woods, and ordered him onto the turnpike. He knew that turnpike well! She next caught a glimpse of an alluring live red macaw, on a screened porch which swung a tea sign, and ordered Bloomer to draw up. Bloomer knew The Sign of the Red Parrot too thoroughly.

He wheezed into the half-circle gravel drive. His worst fears were justified. Peter Tumulty, enthroned in the RollsRoyce which carried that Knox girl who was Miss Cowperthwaite's bosom friend, gaped at the turnout-and recognized Bloomer. . . . Bloomer sat with rigid back, and suffered. . .

But suddenly-long before the tea interval was over-Miss Tait reappeared on the steps. She was followed by a girl in mushroom pinks-Noelle Cowperthwaite! Miss Tait, in her floppy hat and her dress of some dowdy-looking homespun stuff, stepped briskly down to her remarkable vehicle. She paused to address Bloomer, and he felt that Noelle Cowperthwaite had registered his profile! Miss Tait said: "Start the car, Bloomer, and duck! Quick, will you?"

He was out-not to assist her; she had a careless way of overlooking his proper attentions, anyhow-but to attack that misplaced elbow of a crank-handle. He prayed that the damned bus would start. It did.

He saw that Noelle, who had been standing rather uncertainly, was now running down the steps and calling out to them. Curiously, she seemed intent upon Miss Tait, not upon him.

But they were off in a splutter and a blue cloud of smoke. He knew just the spectacle they made. "Heigh, mister, where'd-cha get the tally-ho?" jeered a boy in a passing flivver. Bloomer would crowd that flivver off the road if it was his last act! He swerved, opened up

"Let them by!" sang out Miss Tait from the rear. "Take this right road!” Bloomer was sore; she appreciated neither motor form nor motor tactics.

But Miss Tait, it seemed, was engaged in losing the Knox's Rolls-Royce, which was indeed after them. It whizzed by, and Bloomer had seized the next left turning before Tumulty was back on their trail. He failed to comprehend the race, but he did his best. By sunset he had succeeded in losing Tumulty and in losing themselves on a desolate dune road. The sky was overcast. "But why," said Bloomer, drawing up, "should Miss Cowperthwaite ?" "That was Miss Cowperthwaite?" "Yes, madam. Don't you do you

know her?"

"Her face-only her face was familiar. I made a Current Events talk once, and they're always hounding me for speeches."

"But was it you-or was it me they were chasing?" he puzzled.

"Oh, that was you, Bloomer!" she giggled. "Anyway, we avoided them. And, anyway, it's not I—just the thing I represent that they're after."

"Your organization? You make speeches for your organization?" "Hm."

Bloomer considered it. He knew Noelle Cowperthwaite's cultural fads and her impetuosities. He knew that she was forever picking up nobodies, and strenuously pursuing them.

"I'm famished for my tea; let's go, Bloomer."

"Yes, madam."

But Miss Melissa (it was her name for the relic) chose that darkening hour to refuse to budge. Bloomer cranked-he cranked till he was exhausted. He scrutinized and he tested. "Some part," he

reported, "seems to have died a natural death."

"A new part-?" she suggested. "Where?" He cast his eyes at the heavens, at the undulating, wind-stirred stretch. "Where in town-if we were there? Where in New York itself? She's an orphan, and every nut and bolt in her has gone out. If you knew the insults I've stood from cheap village garage hands!" he said passionately. "Short of luck and a good junk-heap, you'll never replace any part in this bus.'

"Cuss, Bloomer-we'll cuss together!" she chuckled. "Is that rain ?”

It certainly was rain. Together they reared the top. Then things began to happen. Night swooped upon them in a sudden bruised-purple darkness, with sword-play of lightning and fusillade of wind and rain. The hullabaloo of frogs was swallowed, first in the whinnying rush of the gale, then in the cavernous boom-boom of the adjacent sea. Bloomer was abruptly separated from Sally Tait by torrents of water . . . he could neither see nor hear her. His hand moving down the wet flank of the car, he found her in her rear seat. Without sidecurtains, the top was no protection at all. He got his jacket off and about her drenched figure. He made a shelter of his body for her, against the worst force of the storm.

But now there came a particularly vicious, skewery twist of wind . . . a ripping sound . . . and the torrents were from overhead! "Bloomer—what was that?"

"The top!"

"Wh-where is it, Bloomer?"

"God knows, madam," he shouted back. He gathered her into his arms. Minutes passed. He held her tighter, tighter, ostensibly against the demons of weather, really against his own pounding heart. She was talking into his shirtbuttons-Bloomer could feel the movement of her words, but could not hear the sound.

He held her, cherished her, washed by the rain with her and lapped in bliss.... Every stab of lightning was registered in a shuddering of her light frame, in the answering tension of Bloomer's firm guardian hold. . . .

Now a lull, and a fragment of her laugh.

"-Protection, and all the rest. Why, I'll wager, Bloomer, that you're still maintaining 'Woman's place is in the home' !" "It is!"

"So! Whereas really woman's place is in the world-in public life-yes, holding office! All that we ask," she said, extricating herself from his grasp, standing, and flinging out her arms to the declining storm, "is a place in the wind-a share in the fight! I'll bet my hat, Bloomer," she laughed, yanking off that wreck, "that you're the most perfect living exponent of the hearthstone theory. Have you a cigarette? Please.

For no known reason, the drenching seemed to have revived Miss Melissa. An hour later, Bloomer, the dominant male in spite of her protests, carried Miss Tait across intervening pools to the house, deposited her in the hall, and ordered a hot dinner and a hot bath for their mistress of the sniggering maids.

Later, Bloomer passed softly through the hallway, and listened up the stairs. He caught a glimpse of his solid figure in the mirror, paused to admire. She'd have to give up her job and all that political nonsense, though-he was determined upon that. Bloomer, regarding himself, knew a satisfaction at the prospect of making her sacrifice her maidenly eccentricities to him.

"Oh, Bloomer! Will you come up here a minute?"

She was in her room, in a silver-gray kimono, at her dressing-table. She was quite casual-as though she had no consciousness of the effect she was having upon Bloomer.

But Bloomer's step was decisive . . his moment had come.

"Oh, Bloomer. . . . I was just thinking how one doesn't usually get more than one deserves-less sometimes, but seldom more. I didn't thank you for your chivalry-yes, chivalry, Bloomer. You deserve- She dropped into his hand an old heavy ring, with a blood-red stone carved with curious insignia. "I want you to have it. Order of the Knights of the Leather Leggings," she laughed. "But, madam-Sally-!"

"Madam Sally?-I like it! Yes, it's old, Bloomer-very old-older than America. It's English. It's English . . . and now you're wondering! But of course I'm