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 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.

a swamp.

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 . . . and now you're wondering! But of course I'm

Naturally the information raised in Bloomer's mind a dozen questions. Why the Miss Tait? Bloomer eventually decided that she had been divorced, and had resumed her maiden name. This deduction he verified through her. "You are,” he hazarded, “a—a widow?" She glanced up, seemed to grasp his perplexities, hesitated. "Grass," she laughed. "By request. Temporary!" That last was certainly a challenge to him! But what did she mean "By request"? That her husband had divorced her by her request? Bloomer built up an entirely new version of Miss Tait, verified by her manner to him, which had changed not one iota. . . If she had meant to repulse Bloomer, she would certainly not have continued so familiar with him. But Bloomer wasn't at all sure that he could swallow a divorced husband.

He was still debating the matter when a newspaper reporter at their door threw Miss Tait into a panic, and had to be dealt with personally by Bloomer. The divorce, then, must have been recent. He wondered whether it had been a notorious case; asked Miss Tait the name of her husband, but was put off by her. She told Bloomer that Miss Melissa must be got in repair for an immediate jaunt. They set out on the following morning.

While they did a loop of New York State, Bloomer was still debating pro and con. Never in all his closely buttoned, visored, and putteed life had he experienced such a tour. At every hot-dog stand he was against her. Before Ithaca, while he smoked himself together with the bacon over a picnic flame, and Sally Tait, sprawled in the sun, lifted her eyes from the observation of some ants to smile at him, he was unwillingly for her. Beyond Syracuse, when she ordered him to turn his back and stand guard while she took a dip in a certain creek, Bloomer was unconditionally against her. With every mile it was becoming more and

fatuation was a folly. But with every mile the fatal attraction was growing on him, until now, at that unmentionable tourist's camp outside of Utica, he was in danger of the first spontaneous, natural act of his life.

He was in danger of taking Sally Tait into his arms and declaring himself. The shelter was a tent $1.00 per night—and Bloomer, casting his eyes over the litter of common and very adjacent neighbors, had insisted upon sitting guard on Miss Tait's tent platform while she slept. But the snores had entertained that lady, and some time after midnight she had come out to share with Bloomer the view of stars and of a pair of masculine bare feet protruding from a canvas lean-to. She sat on the plank next to his and, arms hugging her kimono-clad knees, rocked herself. . . . "Big dipper, little dipper, milky way. Bloomer."

I'd like to tickle them,

"What, madam?" he said in a queer, strained voice. So little she was, and so close to him. . . . .She had probably led a damned hard life. . . . Some brute of an Englishman.

"Feet. Micky," she dropped, "would tickle them."

"I have Millicent, Michael, and Cynthia. Five, seven, and ten apiece. Years," she added.

"You have three children! But where- -?"

"They are in a summer-camp," she yawned.

Whether Bloomer could have swallowed three children, as well as a divorced husband, is certainly a question. But in the Catskills, Sally Tait did a thing which evoked his final and decisive judgment against her. She had drummed up acquaintance with a rural character, who lived in solitary bachelordom in the vilest, shabbiest-looking hut which Bloomer had ever laid eyes upon. Bloomer had posted himself, after dark, on the platform of her tent, naturally supposing that she was within. All through the night he had maintained tender guard, dropping off only once or twice. At gray dawn he had discovered that she was absent. And at