Chapter 1

PART I, I

IT rose for them--their honey-moon--over the waters of a lake so
famed as the scene of romantic raptures that they were rather
proud of not having been afraid to choose it as the setting of
their own.

"It required a total lack of humour, or as great a gift for it
as ours, to risk the experiment," Susy Lansing opined, as they
hung over the inevitable marble balustrade and watched their
tutelary orb roll its magic carpet across the waters to their
feet.

"Yes--or the loan of Strefford's villa," her husband emended,
glancing upward through the branches at a long low patch of
paleness to which the moonlight was beginning to give the form
of a white house-front.

"Oh, come when we'd five to choose from. At least if you count
the Chicago flat."

"So we had--you wonder!" He laid his hand on hers, and his
touch renewed the sense of marvelling exultation which the
deliberate survey of their adventure always roused in her ....
It was characteristic that she merely added, in her steady
laughing tone: "Or, not counting the flat--for I hate to brag-
just consider the others: Violet Melrose's place at Versailles,
your aunt's villa at Monte Carlo--and a moor!"

She was conscious of throwing in the moor tentatively, and yet
with a somewhat exaggerated emphasis, as if to make sure that he
shouldn't accuse her of slurring it over. But he seemed to have
no desire to do so. "Poor old Fred!" he merely remarked; and
she breathed out carelessly: "Oh, well--"

His hand still lay on hers, and for a long interval, while they
stood silent in the enveloping loveliness of the night, she was
aware only of the warm current running from palm to palm, as the
moonlight below them drew its line of magic from shore to shore.

Nick Lansing spoke at last. "Versailles in May would have been
impossible: all our Paris crowd would have run us down within
twenty-four hours. And Monte Carlo is ruled out because it's
exactly the kind of place everybody expected us to go. So--
with all respect to you--it wasn't much of a mental strain to
decide on Como."

His wife instantly challenged this belittling of her capacity.
"It took a good deal of argument to convince you that we could
face the ridicule of Como!"

"Well, I should have preferred something in a lower key; at
least I thought I should till we got here. Now I see that this
place is idiotic unless one is perfectly happy; and that then
it's-as good as any other."

She sighed out a blissful assent. "And I must say that Streffy
has done things to a turn. Even the cigars--who do you suppose
gave him those cigars?" She added thoughtfully: "You'll miss
them when we have to go."

"Oh, I say,