Monty’s spirits by relentlessly putting him on rigid diet, with most discouraging restrictions upon his conduct.  The period of convalescence was to be an exceedingly trying one for the invalid.  At first he was kept in-doors, and the hours were whiled away by playing cards.  But Monty considered “bridge” the “pons asinorum,” and preferred to play piquet with Peggy.  It was one of these games that the girl interrupted with a question that had troubled her for many days.  “Monty,” she said, and she found it much more difficult than when she had rehearsed the scene in the silence of her walks; “I’ve heard a rumor that Miss Drew and her mother have taken rooms at the hotel.  Wouldn’t it be pleasanter to have them here?”

A heavy gloom settled upon Brewster’s face, and the girl’s heart dropped like lead.  She had puzzled over the estrangement, and wondered if by any effort of her own things could be set right.  At times she had had flashing hopes that it did not mean as much to Monty as she had thought.  But down underneath, the fear that he was unhappy seemed the only certain thing in life.  She felt that she must make sure.  And together with the very human desire to know the worst, was the puritanical impulse to bring it about.

“You forget that this is the last place they would care to invade.”  And in Brewster’s face Peggy seemed to read that for her martyrdom was the only wear.  Bravely she put it on.

“Monty, I forget nothing that I really know.  But this is a case in which you are quite wrong.  Where is your sporting blood?  You have never fought a losing fight before, and you can’t do it now.  You have lost your nerve, Monty.  Don’t you see that this is the time for an aggressive campaign?” Somehow she was not saying things at all as she had planned to say them.  And his gloom weighed heavily upon her.  “You don’t mind, do you, Monty,” she added, more softly, “this sort of thing from me?  I know I ought not to interfere, but I’ve known you so long.  And I hate to see things twisted by a very little mistake.”

But Monty did mind enormously.  He had no desire to talk about the thing anyway, and Peggy’s anxiety to marry him off seemed a bit unnecessary.  Manifestly her own interest in him was of the coldest.  From out of the gloom he looked at her somewhat sullenly.  For the moment she was thinking only of his pain, and her face said nothing.

“Peggy,” he exclaimed, finally, resenting the necessity of answering her, “you don’t in the least know what you are talking about.  It is not a fit of anger on Barbara Drew’s part.  It is a serious conviction.”

“A conviction which can be changed,” the girl broke in.

“Not at all.”  Brewster took it up.  “She has no faith in me.  She thinks I’m an ass.”

“Perhaps she’s right,” she exclaimed, a little hot.  “Perhaps you have never discovered that girls say many things to hide their emotions.  Perhaps you don’t realize what feverish, exclamatory, foolish things girls are.  They don’t know how to be honest with the men they love, and they wouldn’t if they did.  You are little short of an idiot, Monty Brewster, if you believed the things she said rather than the things she looked.”