“Nobody that anybody knows, Honest John.”  Then he added as an after-thought, “Are you sorry?” As he spoke he rose from his seat and stood behind her chair looking down over her figure.  She had her back to him.  He thought he had never seen her look so lovely.  She was wearing a light-blue morning-gown, her arms bare to the elbows, and a wide Leghorn hat—­the morning costume of all others he liked her best in.

“No—­don’t think I am,” she answered lightly.  “Fact is I was getting pretty tired of you.  How long will you be gone?”

“Oh, I think till the end of the week—­not longer.”  He reached over the chair and was about to play with the tiny curls that lay under the coil of her hair, when he checked himself and straightened up.  One of those sudden restraints which had so puzzled Lucy had seized him.  She could not see his face, but she knew from the tones of his voice that the enthusiasm of the moment had cooled.

Lucy shifted her chair, lifted her head, and looked up into his eyes.  She was always entrancing from this point of view:  the upturned eyelashes, round of the cheeks, and the line of the throat and swelling shoulders were like no other woman’s he knew.

“I don’t want you to go, Max,” she said in the same coaxing tone of voice that Ellen might have used in begging for sugar-plums.  “Just let the mortgage and old Morton and everybody else go.  Stay here with me.”

Max straightened up and threw out his chest and a determined look came into his eyes.  If he had had any doubts as to his departure Lucy’s pleading voice had now removed them.

“No, can’t do it,” he answered in mock positiveness.  “Can’t ’pon my soul.  Business is business.  Got to see Morton right away; ought to have seen him before.”  Then he added in a more serious tone, “Don’t get worried if I stay a day or two longer.”

“Well, then, go, you great bear, you,” and she rose to her feet and shook out her skirts.  “I wouldn’t let you stay, no matter what you said.”  She was not angry—­she was only feeling about trying to put her finger on the particular button that controlled Max’s movements.  “Worried?  Not a bit of it.  Stay as long as you please.”

There was a button, could she have found it.  It was marked “Caution,” and when pressed communicated to the heir of Walnut Hill the intelligence that he was getting too fond of the pretty widow and that his only safety lay in temporary flight.  It was a favorite trick of his.  In the charting of his course he had often found two other rocks beside Scylla and Charybdis in his way; one was boredom and the other was love.  When a woman began to bore him, or he found himself liking her beyond the limit of his philosophy, he invariably found relief in change of scene.  Sometimes it was a sick aunt or a persistent lawyer or an engagement nearly forgotten and which must be kept at all hazards.  He never, however, left his inamorata in either tears or anger.