sometimes a strenuous burden, and in reading this she was forced to put it behind her.  However, the book did not prevent her from returning every now and then to her own life and the happenings in it.  Hence her stealthy journeys across the house and peeps at the men in the grove.  If they were nettled by a sense of feminine mystery, she reciprocated.  “What on earth did they want to stop Rose from going to see Lucy for?” seemed to stare at her in blacker type than the characters of the book.

Presently, when she saw Horace pass the window and disappear down the road, she laid the book on the table, with a slip of paper to keep the place, and hurried out to the grove.  She found Henry leisurely coming towards the house.  “Where has he gone?” she inquired, with a jerk of her shoulder towards the road.

“Mr. Allen?”

“Yes.”

“How should I know?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Maybe I do,” said Henry, smiling at Sylvia with his smile of affection and remembrance that she was a woman.

“Why don’t you tell?”

“Now, Sylvia,” said Henry, “you must remember that Mr. Allen is not a child.  He is a grown man, and if he takes it into his head to go anywhere you can’t say anything.”

Sylvia looked at Henry with a baffled expression.  “I think he might spend his time a good deal more profitably Sunday afternoon than sitting under the trees and smoking, or going walking,” said she, rashly and inconsequentially.  “If he would only sit down and read some good book.”

“You can’t dictate to Mr. Allen what he shall or shall not do,” Henry repeated.

“Why didn’t you want Rose to go to Lucy’s?” asked Sylvia, making a charge in an entirely different quarter.

Henry scorned to lie.  “I don’t know,” he replied, which was the perfect truth as far as it went.  It did not go quite far enough, for he did not add that he did not know why Horace Allen did not want her to go, and that was his own reason.

However, Sylvia could not possibly fathom that.  She sniffed with her delicate nostrils, as if she actually smelled some questionable odor of character.  “You men have mighty queer streaks, that’s all I’ve got to say,” she returned.

When they were in the house again she resumed her book, reading every word carefully, and Henry took up the Sunday paper, which he had not finished.  The thoughts of both, however, turned from time to time towards Horace.  Sylvia did not know where he had gone.  She did not suspect.  Henry knew, but he did not know why.  Horace had sprung suddenly to his feet and caught up his hat as the two men had been sitting under the trees.  Henry had emitted a long puff of tobacco smoke and looked inquiringly at him through the filmy blue of it.

“I can’t stand it another minute,” said Horace, almost with violence.  “I’ve got to know what is going on.  I am going to the Ayres’s myself.  I don’t care what they think.  I don’t care what she thinks.  I don’t care what anybody thinks.”  With that he was gone.