“When will you do this?” asked the girl.

Hartley clinched his teeth and bent his brows together.

“To-night,” he said, resolutely.  “I will send her away to-night.”

“Then,” said Vivienne, “my answer is ‘yes.’  Come for me when you will.”

She looked into his eyes with a sweet, sincere light in her own.  Hartley could scarcely believe that her surrender was true, it was so swift and complete.

“Promise me,” he said feelingly, “on your word and honour.”

“On my word and honour,” repeated Vivienne, softly.

At the door he turned and gazed at her happily, but yet as one who scarcely trusts the foundations of his joy.

“To-morrow,” he said, with a forefinger of reminder uplifted.

“To-morrow,” she repeated with a smile of truth and candour.

In an hour and forty minutes Hartley stepped off the train at Floralhurst.  A brisk walk of ten minutes brought him to the gate of a handsome two-story cottage set upon a wide and well-tended lawn.  Halfway to the house he was met by a woman with jet-black braided hair and flowing white summer gown, who half strangled him without apparent cause.

When they stepped into the hall she said: 

“Mamma’s here.  The auto is coming for her in half an hour.  She came to dinner, but there’s no dinner.”

“I’ve something to tell you,” said Hartley.  “I thought to break it to you gently, but since your mother is here we may as well out with it.”

He stooped and whispered something at her ear.

His wife screamed.  Her mother came running into the hall.  The dark-haired woman screamed again—­the joyful scream of a well-beloved and petted woman.

“Oh, mamma!” she cried ecstatically, “what do you think?  Vivienne is coming to cook for us!  She is the one that stayed with the Montgomerys a whole year.  And now, Billy, dear,” she concluded, “you must go right down into the kitchen and discharge Heloise.  She has been drunk again the whole day long.”

VII

SOCIOLOGY IN SERGE AND STRAW

The season of irresponsibility is at hand.  Come, let us twine round our brows wreaths of poison ivy (that is for idiocy), and wander hand in hand with sociology in the summer fields.

Likely as not the world is flat.  The wise men have tried to prove that it is round, with indifferent success.  They pointed out to us a ship going to sea, and bade us observe that, at length, the convexity of the earth hid from our view all but the vessel’s topmast.  But we picked up a telescope and looked, and saw the decks and hull again.  Then the wise men said:  “Oh, pshaw! anyhow, the variation of the intersection of the equator and the ecliptic proves it.”  We could not see this through our telescope, so we remained silent.  But it stands to reason that, if the world were round, the queues of Chinamen would stand straight up from their heads instead of hanging down their backs, as travellers assure us they do.